It occurs to me that if Google is smart they'll take a hands off approach with QPX. It's a service ITA runs for its customers and it's got to have some pretty stiff service level guarantees. For a bunch of their customers, if it's not up their customers can't book flights (well, they could book them, but they couldn't find out which flights to book).
Google's infrastructure is just not up to this level. Customers with multi-year contracts like Alitalia will be none too pleased if QPX's infrastructure and code is mindlessly "Googlized" (well, Alitalia might be a bad example given Google's problems with Italy, maybe they'll say "Nice airline you have here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it." :-).
I can seem them doing the above, spinning off or ending QRES (a problem of bad timing as I've noted elsewhere), and then doing interesting things with various parts of QPX. At the very least ITA has a whole bunch of interesting data feeds ... then again, I wonder what sort of contractual restrictions there might be on them. Still, Google would be miles ahead by buying ITA and only requiring negotiations instead of starting from scratch, i.e. not even knowing what data feeds are out there until they hire domain experts. And then there's capture and formatting and all that stuff, all already done in C++ by ITA.
They could be buying ITA for its domain expertise plus its pile of crackerjack programmers, the ones working on QRES wouldn't be pleased to be moved from Common Lisp but that could beat the alternatives. Tough luck for the QRES Oracle RAC people at all levels, but perhaps there's a good market for their expertise (Microsoft sure had fun there when they screwed up with Danger/Sidekick). And the QRES front end software is in Java (only the middleware is in Common Lisp).
Google's infrastructure is just not up to this level. Customers with multi-year contracts like Alitalia will be none too pleased if QPX's infrastructure and code is mindlessly "Googlized" (well, Alitalia might be a bad example given Google's problems with Italy, maybe they'll say "Nice airline you have here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it." :-).
I can seem them doing the above, spinning off or ending QRES (a problem of bad timing as I've noted elsewhere), and then doing interesting things with various parts of QPX. At the very least ITA has a whole bunch of interesting data feeds ... then again, I wonder what sort of contractual restrictions there might be on them. Still, Google would be miles ahead by buying ITA and only requiring negotiations instead of starting from scratch, i.e. not even knowing what data feeds are out there until they hire domain experts. And then there's capture and formatting and all that stuff, all already done in C++ by ITA.
They could be buying ITA for its domain expertise plus its pile of crackerjack programmers, the ones working on QRES wouldn't be pleased to be moved from Common Lisp but that could beat the alternatives. Tough luck for the QRES Oracle RAC people at all levels, but perhaps there's a good market for their expertise (Microsoft sure had fun there when they screwed up with Danger/Sidekick). And the QRES front end software is in Java (only the middleware is in Common Lisp).