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Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

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Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#12

Post by alberth »

Oracle acquiring Sun.

I know there is a lot of Oracle hate but: MySQL, GraalVM (Java), Sun hardware (both Exa* and SPARC), VirtualBox and many more technologies are better today than prior.

The challenge Sun would have had, regardless of Oracle or not, is that they were solidly in the On-Prem business ... and the market has moved to Cloud.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#13

Post by jedberg »

alberth wrote: post #12

Oracle acquiring Sun. I know there is a lot of Oracle hate but: MySQL, GraalVM (Java), Sun hardware (both Exa* and SPARC), VirtualBox and many more technologies are better today than prior. The challenge Sun would have had, regardless of Oracle or not, is that they were solidly in the On-Prem business ... and the market has moved to Cloud.

Lol talk to anyone who was there and they would tell you that Oracle absolutely destroyed Sun.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#14

Post by digb »

neilk wrote: post #2

Salesforce recently acquired Tableau and from what I hear the acquisition has probably improved things at Tableau. This is a very special case though! Tableau is a company with a lot of Fortune 500 buy-in, but an aging development stack and business model. So this is the case of a somewhat more dynamic larger company acquiring a set of customers and some fundamental tech. Usually acquisitions are from big/slow/establ…

Having previously worked at SFDC, I would not wager that it's much more dynamic than Tableau.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#16

Post by jedberg »

taylorwc wrote: post #11

Pixar acquisition by Disney comes to mind

Technically that was a merger, which made Steve Jobs the largest Disney shareholder (more than any member of the Disney family).

But yeah you have a good point. They retained their culture and in fact spread it further by having the Pixar folks take over Disney Animation.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#17

Post by alberth »

jedberg wrote: post #13
alberth wrote: post #12

Oracle acquiring Sun. I know there is a lot of Oracle hate but: MySQL, GraalVM (Java), Sun hardware (both Exa* and SPARC), VirtualBox and many more technologies are better today than prior. The challenge Sun would have had, regardless of Oracle or not, is that they were solidly in the On-Prem business ... and the market has moved to Cloud.

Lol talk to anyone who was there and they would tell you that Oracle absolutely destroyed Sun.

I was there.

Nothing destroyed. Just differences in company culture.

The alternative for Sun was IBM to buy them. An acquisition by IBM would have been the death of Sun. Sun, under Oracle, still lives on well today.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#18

Post by no-dr-onboard »

tpmx wrote: post #15
taylorwc wrote: post #11

Pixar acquisition by Disney comes to mind

Strong disagreement. The acquisition happened in 2006. The last few great Pixar movies were in the pipeline already (Ratatouille - 2007, WALL-E - 2008, Up - 2009).

I disagree too from a animation/story-quality perspective, but from a business perspective, Pixar seems to be doing well enough to meet OPs criteria of not being ruined.
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