Yes, I noticed that same line too from the original eweek article linked here. That was the most interesting line in the whole article, but the eWeek article spent more time regurgitating the price of YouTube and DoubleClick, something that has been covered a billion times already.
Hiring's only obsolete while the stock market remains inflated and the cash keeps piling up. Come next recession, the deals will dry up like the Sahara.
Then again, come next recession, hiring will likely dry up too. So maybe hiring is obsolete.
The way Google does it, it's almost hiring, just with slightly bigger starting bonuses, and a different interview process. None of the normal trappings of acquisitions (integrations and fuck-you money spring to mind) are there.
I think we've been through this in previous threads: that list only covers acquisitions which were high-profile enough to get media coverage, or which were high-dollar enough to be itemized on Google's quarterly report. That only makes up a small portion of them.
