Google on Thursday made another acquisition for its cloud-computing business that competes with Amazon.com Inc. Each deal it does is a reminder of Google’s failures so far in this lucrative field and a potential warning sign to the software specialists that have thrived in the last decade.
Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, said on Thursday that it was spending $2.6 billion to buy Looker, which sells software to help businesses wrangle their data, make charts or other visualizations out of it and glean insights that can improve their operations. This is not a new category of software, but the proliferation of cloud computing and simpler software accessed over the web has given rise to a flood of data-analysis software specialists including Tableau Software Inc., Qlik Technologies Inc. and Domo Inc.
