It has been around five years since I started making photos. Over the past few months, I feel that a certain level of harmony has developed between what my mind sees and what the camera captures. Though, the real magic still happens when I transform that digital negative into my interpretation of the scene.

So, what have I learned thus far?

From Wall Streeters to members of the media, it is not uncommon to hear people wax eloquent about Facebook’s high-profile acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp as prescient moves toward future-proofing the business. But Google’s success with perhaps innocuous-seeming acquisitions often gets overlooked.

The jury is still out on Looker, the data analytics company Google bought to add muscle to its fledgling cloud business for $2.6 billion. Whether or not it turns out to be the next YouTube or next Motorola, it is an interesting bet. In its history, Google has bought over 200 companies, spending quite a substantial chunk of change on them. Many of them were well-known and, in some cases, established businesses — Doubleclick, for example.

However, I want to focus on strategic deals that have helped Google evolve and have kept it a dominant player in the ever-changing Internet ecosystem. Here is my list of their top acquisitions based on the best return on investment for the company and the potential for future-proofing it effectively.

1. The best shows are on HBO, Seriously! Vulture ranks the catalog of the network, and after you are done reading the article, you realize how much quality is packed into the HBO archives. The Wire is probably the number one show on HBO ever, though these writers don’t agree with me on that.
2. Technology is as biased as its makers. Machine learning and algorithms have received recent attention for being biased, but technology has always been this way.
3. What’s with Khaki? Where did it come from?
4. The unlikely origins of USB, the port that changed everything. This is by one of my favorite writers, Joel Johnson. So, you know it is very good and deeply researched.
5. How YouTube’s related algorithm is helping create a new genre of music: Vice calls it “the first genre of Algorithm Age.”

This first appeared on my June 2, 2019, weekly newsletter. If you like to get this delivered to your inbox, just sign-up here, and I will take care of the rest.

I have had a few days to think about Microsoft’s decision to buy GitHub for $7.5 billion and I am increasingly convinced that this is a good deal for Microsoft, as long as they don’t pull the same shenanigans they did with Skype. The acquisition makes a lot of sense, especially when you see it from the lens of two of the most successful “buys” of recent years.