What will the world’s most innovative company buy next? I have been thinking about that in the last month of 2005. The result is a small roundup:



AMR’s Bruce Richardson thinks Google should buy Rearden Commerce, pioneer of a new buzzword, namely, Employee Business Services (EBS), which revolutionizes the way businesses procure services such as travel, small package delivery, conferencing, and so on.



Gregory Burd has recently suggested that Google should buy UPS. His reasoning:

Google should do something totally unexpected for a change and buy a company with massive physical assets. The suggestion is for Google to buy UPS, then compete with eBay and PayPal.

Following Knoght Ridder’s plights, it had been suggested that Google should buy Knight Ridder and become a ‘real’ media powerhouse. A content producer, no less.



Way earlier Emblog had pondered,Should Google buy Monster? - Yahoo already had Hotjobs.



Russell Shaw of The Industry Standard thinks Google should buy blog-tracker and search engine Technorati.

Google is great for archived content, but both Feedster and Technorati kick butt when it comes to the freshest stuff.

In June, Kuro5hin had given out a list of potential Google buyout targets. The list included photo-hosting service Buzznet, Koders - search engine for open source code, the social bookmarking powerhouse del.icio.us, wiki-based travel site world66 and The Open Directory project among others. Non-profit like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive are of course, impossible objectives. The article also has a useful list of Google’s buys. That doesn’t contain the hot photo-recognition service Riya.



There have been talks of Google’s possible buying of Tivo and free-falling AOL - but the jury is still out on them.



Back in October, Techdirt ran this cute piece on SBC’s threat for popular internet companies and had suggested that Google should buy SBC before anything else.



Back in 2004, it was suggested on Feld Thoughts that Google should adhere to its “Do No Evil” slogan and buy SCO before all hell broke lose.



But I am yet to see a web2.0 company aprt from del.icio.us fit for Google’s buyout plans. Any more ideas?