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Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
71–80 of 173 posts
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#72Instagram ($1 billion), WhatsApp ($19 billion)
Obviously we'll never know but I'd love to see an alternate timeline where those acquisitions didn't happen. Instagram specifically has just become another ad infested shopping app for me these days.
I'm not a meaningful Instagram user nor would I defend it as "good", but from a "success" perspective, for my demographic (I'm a 30-something US resident), it is clearly the most relevant social network.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#73The Acquired podcast does case studies of successful acquisitions:
It's an amazing show
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#74Google acquiring YouTube "In the Plex" by Steven Levy goes into great detail on how YouTube could not survive its growth without the infrastructure and ad technologies Google brought to the platform.
That's an argument for the acquisition of YT by Google being net positive, but it doesn't answer the OP's question, which he specifically restricts to the "less tangible parts of the smaller company".
>but it doesn't answer the OP's question
I think it does, otherwise OP's question is ill-posed. That is, if YouTube scaled independently from a scrappy startup to a $170billion behemoth, the changes in corporate governance and culture would have been equally as drastic as being acquired by Google.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#75I think github got better after Microsoft bought them. They were in some stale rut for a long time before that.
I agree, but this is a hot take among a lot of free software purists.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#76I think github got better after Microsoft bought them. They were in some stale rut for a long time before that.
Yep I agree. And unlike where lots of acquisitions die down after years even if they do ok initially, it's taken years but Github finally seems to be increasing the pace of innovation.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#77Salesforce 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?
I've been working with Tableau for around 10 years and the most noticeable thing was making it easier for both developers and end-users to use the platform. Everything from mobile, to toolbar improvements, alerts, the API, etc. seem to have really come together.
Now, these could all have very well been in development before the acquisition, but as a whole, the capabilities have grown tremendously since that time.
Also, it seems like the licensing options for smaller businesses has really been focused on since the acquisition. It's become much more affordable for a small business to get and use Tableau compared to 4-5 years ago.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#78I think github got better after Microsoft bought them. They were in some stale rut for a long time before that.
I agree, but this is a hot take among a lot of free software purists.
Yes that is true, but lucky for me, I'm not one. So I can clearly see how much better it become. I don't even understand why. I would have thought they were profitable before the acquisition (were they?) so why resources only started being applied afterwards?
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#79Earlier 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.
> Just differences in company culture
Which is what this thread is largely about.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#80I think github got better after Microsoft bought them. They were in some stale rut for a long time before that.
The got better because they finally got to money to try to be competitive with GitLab. Before that they were really behind on features.
However their reliability is down the toilet. So a mixed bag, IMHO.