Taking into account the admob and gizmo acquisitions, I cant help but admire google's acquisition strategy. Yes, they have made several acquisitions (dodgeball,jaiku etc.) only to shelve them later, but a lot of their acquisitions (doubleclick, analytics, admob) etc. are super strategic moves - compare this to yahoo's approach over the last few years, which acquired so many startups only to deadpool or offload majority of them.
Completely agree. Dodgeball/Jaiku and the likes are sooooper tiny compared to the ones that google has gotten right(YouTube/Urchin/doubleclick). Yahoo can learn leaps from them. I don't think enough can be said about how good Google's acquisition strategy is.