Deloitte's acquisition of BearingPoint's Federal practice in 2008-9. Fascinating to watch from the inside -- literally the same people increased revenue & margins with happier employees, primarily driven by implementing a better management and incentives culture with better HR practices. Also interesting that Deloitte hired their corporate M&A integration group to run the integration for themselves.
Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
61–70 of 173 posts
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Cars 2 was the only real stinker. I agree they're not 100% excellent, but most are at least okay. And from your list: Brave, Cars 3, Coco, Onward, Luca, and Turning Red I all consider great to excellent. I haven't seen Lightyear yet.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#63Cisco's acquisitions. There's a book about them. The Crescendo switch acquisition was extremely successful and they became Catalyst switches.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Google also buys a ton of StorageTek.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#65Salesforce's acquisition of Slack, possibly. A good portion of folks I know don't even know Slack was acquired, which is a good sign.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#66Cisco bought Duo Security, and by all accounts from the people I know that work there, the culture is pretty intact and people happy. Maybe that has changed in the past year or so, though!
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#67Sadly Heroku/Salesforce used to be my go-to-example here, but that fell apart a few years ago when they effectively froze new feature development.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#68Cisco's acquisitions. There's a book about them. The Crescendo switch acquisition was extremely successful and they became Catalyst switches.
Cisco has an interesting playbook with spin-outs as well, that I haven't seen many companies pull off (i.e. mpls multiple times over)
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Lightyear was a letdown. My kids enjoyed it but I thought it could have been much better. I expected to see Buzz as at this exciting space ranger, but that wasn't what the movie was about. If I was Andy from Toy Story there would be no way I wanted a Buzz toy after seeing that movie.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#70Salesforce 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…
I worked at Tableau until very recently and I can't think of any way that the Salesforce acquisition has improved things yet (I do think it will eventually improve things). Did you hear about anything specific?