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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?

#31

Post by chubot »

jjoonathan wrote: post #24
fredguth wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the example, but can you say that NeXT was a large acquisition for Apple? How big was NeXT compared to Apple? Does size matter in this analysis? I believe so. I don't know much about this particular acquisition, but I always assumed that buying NeXT was the price to get Jobs back.

Aren't half the UI classes in OSX still prefixed with "NS" for NextStep?

Yeah my understanding is that most of the OS X team were from Next, so Apple definitely got something out of the acquisition

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

#33

Post by creshal »

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.

Even on the remaining on-prem market, who's still using MySQL over MariaDB or Postgres? Who's using SPARC over X64? Who's using Virtualbox over HyperV, Libvirt or VMWare?

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

#34

Post by tpmx »

xnx wrote: post #25
tpmx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Counterpoint: Inside Out, Soul

Inside out was good, but not great, IMO.

Counter-counterpoints:

Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Cars 3, Coco, Onward, Luca, Turning Red, Lightyear.

The (not very original) point is: You can no longer count on a Pixar movie being excellent.

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

#35

Post by pforret »

alberth wrote: post #17
jedberg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn’t Google interested? It would have given them tons of IP and might have saved them from the law suits Oracle brought over Android.

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

#36

Post by QuillianR »

LVMH has purchased a lot of companies that have maintained success, but they are a holding company that runs companies more as independent subsidiaries. If software followed this model it might be alright, but most of the acquisitions by big companies are trying to merge the new company into the old, vs. buying, running and sustaining a company as a continuing business.

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

#37

Post by BryantD »

taylorwc wrote: post #11

Pixar acquisition by Disney comes to mind

I'd argue that Marvel is another example, although a complex one. Marvel Comics has changed very little in terms of culture; Ike Perlmutter runs it very much the way he ran it when it was independent. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been great for Marvel but is no longer under Marvel Comics proper (it's part of the studio group now).

As long as we're doing Disney acquisitions, Lucasfilm is also still pretty independent and successful. Other Disney acquisitions have been less so.

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

#38

Post by pjlegato »

InTheArena wrote: post #4

NeXT with Apple is a pretty solid canonical case. In that situation, it really became a reverse acquisition with Steve Jobs regaining control of Apple. We've done a number of acquisitions - and most seem to have done well. A big portion of that is recognizing that you are not only acquiring the company - it's IP and people - but also it's culture. If you don't want that culture - if it's not better then yours, you do…

In this case, Apple's culture changed to match NeXT's.

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

#39

Post by PAPPPmAc »

fredguth wrote: post #9
InTheArena wrote: post #4

NeXT with Apple is a pretty solid canonical case. In that situation, it really became a reverse acquisition with Steve Jobs regaining control of Apple. We've done a number of acquisitions - and most seem to have done well. A big portion of that is recognizing that you are not only acquiring the company - it's IP and people - but also it's culture. If you don't want that culture - if it's not better then yours, you do…

I like the example, but can you say that NeXT was a large acquisition for Apple? How big was NeXT compared to Apple? Does size matter in this analysis? I believe so. I don't know much about this particular acquisition, but I always assumed that buying NeXT was the price to get Jobs back.

I've seen and used the phrase "NeXT bought Apple with Apple's money" for that acquisition, they didn't just replace Gil Amelio with Steve Jobs, they also had a huge fraction of their management and tech leads swapped out with NeXT folk in pretty short order. They also turned over a huge number of board members in '96-97 as Apple flailed then reformed. Apple spent $429M on NeXT (Apples market cap at the time was around $2B) when they were losing about $700M a quarter and expected to be bankrupt by the end of 1996. They slid through the bad spot partly on a $150M investment (...possibly motivated by antitrust avoidance) from Microsoft.

Steve drove (Chief Operating Officer) Marco Landi and (chief technologist) Ellen Hancock out even before he became CEO. Bertrand Serlet (1997-2009) then Craig Federighi (2009-) ran the (variously named) OS team and Avie Tenivan was the tech lead, all former NeXT folks (which makes sense because Apple failed at 3 OS projects then shipped reskinned NeXTStep). Bud Tribble followed Steve to NeXT then back to Apple in various VP roles. George Crow and Jon Rubinstein did the same kind of loop working on hardware platforms at Apple-NeXT-Apple. Mitch Mandich became SVP of sales almost immediately after the acquisition. Etc.

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

#40

Post by groovybits »

BryantD wrote: post #37
taylorwc wrote: post #11

Pixar acquisition by Disney comes to mind

I'd argue that Marvel is another example, although a complex one. Marvel Comics has changed very little in terms of culture; Ike Perlmutter runs it very much the way he ran it when it was independent. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been great for Marvel but is no longer under Marvel Comics proper (it's part of the studio group now). As long as we're doing Disney acquisitions, Lucasfilm is also still pretty indepen…

Lucasfilm, perhaps.

LucasArts (now known as Lucasfilm Games)... tell that to the games that were put on hold and then eventually cancelled upon acquisition.

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