谷歌高管：摩托罗拉卖给联想是笔好买卖

    一年前，丹•哈里森成为谷歌公司（Google）的收购与并购负责人。但实际上，从2001年起，他就直在帮助谷歌进行收购。当时，谷歌抢购了互联网新闻组服务网站Deja News。这是这家公司的第一笔收购交易。

    哈里森原先是Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati律师事务所的一名律师，2005年加入谷歌。十年来，他一直负责谷歌并购交易的法律事务。后来，他的前任、戴维•劳威被调任到谷歌旗下的一家投资机构担任负责人，哈里森便接管了有关商业事宜。在哈里森的领导下，谷歌公司加快了并购的步伐，先后收购了导航应用Waze；智能家用设备制造商Nest；人工智能初创公司DeepMind Technologies；以及多家机器人公司。

    担任谷歌企业发展副总裁后，哈里森首次接受媒体采访。他对《财富》杂志（Fortune）谈到了公司CEO拉里•佩奇对收购的看法。

    《财富》杂志：拉里•佩奇似乎希望通过更激进的并购将谷歌推向新的方向。

    哈里森：拉里确实希望积极参与到前景广阔的领域，在这些领域我们可以用到探索式思维。

    过去一年，谷歌的许多交易都进入了半公开的实验室Google X。谷歌在这里策划自己最先进的项目。拉里给过你怎样的授权？

    谷歌的Google X项目并没有新产品领域那么多。我得到的最高授权就是，寻找一些正在致力于解决重大问题的、有意思的公司。

    我们的收购通常分成三个领域。首先，我们会寻找专注于人才与技术的小型交易。其次，我们所关注的领域是，我们认为它拥有我们希望在一款产品中实现的核心功能，通过收购公司，可以让这款产品更完满。第三个领域也与公司的核心业务有关。一旦我们认为需要进入一个领域，但必须迅速实现规模化，我们就会进行第三种收购。

    从2007年以来，我们一直在坚持这个原则。今年，我又增加了拉里的另外一个要求。他希望参与一些大项目，（为谷歌）增加新的产品领域。

    那么，根据为谷歌拓展新领域的要求，公司进行了哪些交易？

    Nest公司和安迪•鲁宾就是最好的例子。安迪在自动化方面的努力目的是建立一个新的产品领域。我们帮助他收购了七、八家公司，他将这些公司组合成一家进行自动化研究的综合性公司。谷歌一直对这些领域非常感兴趣。虽然它们不属于谷歌的核心业务，但我们看到了它们的未来，它们将很好地配合我们现有的产品与服务。

    Don Harrison became Google's head of mergers and acquisitions about a year ago. But he's been helping Google (GOOG) buy companies since 2001, when the company snapped up the Internet newsgroups archive Deja News, its first acquisition ever.

    Harrison, then a lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, joined Google in 2005. After a dozen years working the legal side of deals, he took over the business side when his predecessor, David Lawee, left to oversee a new Google investment arm. Under Harrison, the pace of deals has accelerated with the acquisitions of Waze, the navigation app; Nest, the smart home devices maker; DeepMind Technologies, an artificial intelligence startup; and a string of robotics companies.

    In his first interview since he became vice president of corporate development, Harrison spoke with Fortune about how CEO Larry Page thinks about acquisitions.

    Fortune: It seems like Larry Page wants to use M&A more aggressively to push Google in new directions.

    Harrison: Larry does want to be active in identifying areas where we can make big bets, were we can use moonshot thinking.

    Over the past year, a lot of deals are for companies that have ended up over at Google X, the semi-secret lab were Google cooks up its most advanced projects. What kind of mandate has Larry given you?

    They are not so much Google X as new product areas within Google. At its highest level the mandate is to find interesting companies that are moving things forward that are solving big problems.

    Our acquisitions generally fall into three rough buckets. We look for smaller deals that are focused on talent and technology. We also focus on areas where we identified a core functionality that we are we are trying to implement across a product, and we can fill out that offering as a result of buying companies. There's a third area, which is still core, where we recognize that we need to be in an area, but we need to get to scale quickly.

    Those three have been fairly consistent since 2007. This year, I sort of got to add to that this desire from Larry to really identify some big bets and add new product areas [to Google].

    So what are the deals that fall under the new mandate to stretch Google into new areas?

    Nest and Andy Rubin efforts are the biggest examples of this. Andy's efforts in automation are about building a new product area. We have helped him buy seven or eight companies that he has assembled into a pretty comprehensive approach to automation. Those are areas that Google as a whole has been interested in. [They] are somewhat outside the core, but we see a future where those things can work very well with our existing products and services.