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

OS X was an upgraded NeXTStep (including an all-new GUI and printing subsystem) with the addition of two ways of running old Mac applications: Classic mode, which was a full OS9 environment running under hardware virtualization, and the Carbon APIs, which were a set of upgraded but mostly-compatible C/C++ APIs that allowed Mac applications from the last decade and a half to be carried forward. These APIs survived for about ten years, and while they were not completely frozen in time, there was always a feeling that they were the second-class, legacy choice compared to the "native" alternative, Cocoa. There was never a 64-bit Carbon, so running (much less compiling) Carbon apps has been impossible for quite some time now.

The Objective-C Cocoa APIs are a straight descendant of the NeXTStep APIs, and many NeXT apps would run on OS X with a simple recompile. While there have been many additions since, and the main focus these days is on the Swift language, to the best of my knowledge, you can still take an Objective-C NeXT application and compile it on your ARMintosh and have it run with very few issues.

I was a Mac user from 1989, and I didn't like OS X much at the time. It felt like a completely new system, not an update to what I was used to. Sure, it was better in many technical ways, but it was also a lot more complicated. And it felt different. So there were was definitely a sense that it was really a Mac anymore.

Just about the only technical concession to the old Mac crowd that I can think of was the use of the old HFS+ file system, over NeXT's UNIX filesystem. And I think this was only because there was a transition period of several years where dual-booting was common, even necessary. So you could install OS X next to your old OS 9 system and boot either at your discretion without having to have several partitions. Mac OS9 is very dependent on some features in its FS, so this was the only way to allow a smooth transition. But other than that, OS X was and felt like a new, alien system, even though it did allow for compatibility with many applications.

The question was pretty poorly worded IMO, but its an important one.

Usually when a company is acquired, certain unique (and attractive) features of its company culture die pretty fast.

These can be measurable things eg: PTO policies, imposing certain dev environments/corp machine policies on devs, bonus structures, conference/training allowances, frequency and structure of meetings, etc.

Or these can be more vague things, like shifts in how internal comms work, the death of informal means of resolving issues, incremental shifts in management style, etc.

The last acquisition I went through (as an employee of the acquired company) resulted in about half of my team leaving pretty quick. The acquirer basically took away all the perks that made working there worthwhile (compared to any given competitor).

If my current employer was to be acquired, I'm willing to bet that the entire staff of the business unit I'm part of will be looking for new jobs, as I doubt the acquirer would be giving us the degree of freedom that we have currently.

I'd argue that the old-school criterium for a "successful" Pixar movie was that it needed to be great, not just good.

AOL/Time Warner

(Time Warner was the acquired company.)

woot.com is not a good example of company culture staying good. The employees got so fed up, they left and started meh.com, which seems to be just “woot.com again.”