Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 173 posts

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

#141

Post by skinnymuch »

influx wrote: post #52
open-source-ux wrote: post #50

Amazon owns the following companies selling books: - AbeBooks (acquired by Amazon in 2008) - Book Depository (acquired by Amazon in 2011) These companies don't appeared to have changed dramatically from when Amazon bought them. I wonder if these companies operate 'independently' without too much undue influence from Amazon?

You left out Amazing acquiring IMDB in 1998! Hasn't changed much since then. Likewise woot.com in 2010.

In more recent years, someone within the Amazon org chart ruined Box Office Mojo for IMDB. The shutting down of the forums seemed unnecessary too. Both seem to have been done to push IMDB as a more professional site for sales.

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

#143

Post by ryan_lane »

websap wrote: post #140

Instagram. Facebook did a pretty good job maintaining the core product.

Except that now Facebook has been messing with Instagram, and the feed is basically exactly the same as Facebook. More than half of my feed is content from accounts I haven't followed, and it's mostly the same short-video format that makes Facebook's feed awful to use.

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

#144

Post by mikercampbell »

waynesonfire wrote: post #133
rossdavidh wrote: post #81

So, one thing to keep in mind with all of this is that, if it was a small, fast-growing startup that got acquired, there was zero chance of it staying that way even if it did not get acquired. Being small and fast-growing for very long, is by definition impossible. In many cases, when a smaller company gets acquired by a big one, it's because they have hit the point where the founder of the smaller company realizes t…

This is such bs. Why do you have to grow so fast? Wtf. Stop taking loans and having to sell your soul to get out.

The best way to do X is to do it as hard as possible until it becomes Y overnight.

Haha I joke, but seriously. I was cramming my way to the finish line of my startup idea when I realized I didn't need to. HN showed me that side-gigs can be as big or small as you want or need them to be, customers be willing.

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

#145

Post by balderdash »

rossdavidh wrote: post #81

So, one thing to keep in mind with all of this is that, if it was a small, fast-growing startup that got acquired, there was zero chance of it staying that way even if it did not get acquired. Being small and fast-growing for very long, is by definition impossible. In many cases, when a smaller company gets acquired by a big one, it's because they have hit the point where the founder of the smaller company realizes t…

Yep - it just accelerates what would have happened down the road.

In addition to institutionalization (yeah “asking Bob” is not a scalable solution) the other thing is risk skew changes. When you’re a startup in a garage with nothing to lose, who cares about compliance and adhering to laws and regulations (there is very little downside, and you’re a small target). When you’re worth a $1b now you’re a bigger target, and have value to protect…

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

#146

Post by nonameiguess »

I'm probably answering too late to not get lost at this point in the sea of people answering regarding products not being ruined, but as far as actual company culture, E Systems survived quite well and intact after being acquired by Raytheon in the late 90s. One of my earlier jobs in Richardson, TX was at a facility that originally belonged to E Systems and I worked on one of the longstanding programs they'd had for decades. It very much stood out as being nothing at all like the rest of Raytheon. They had exemptions for nearly every corporate policy. People on any other program got moved around at will to meet the needs of the larger company, but anybody who had been with E Systems stayed exactly where they wanted to be doing what they wanted to do, even decades after the acquisition. They kept all of their original scheduling policies, continued using the same project management methods and tech stack without having to give in to corporate flavor of the month "Agile DevOps transformation" stuff that everyone else had to do.

It's honestly probably still the best job in software I've ever had, and the actual system I worked on is still the most impressive I've been a part of, the exception to the rule of government shit projects, heavily classified but absolutely miles ahead of the closest commercial analog. If the pay wasn't so low, I'd gladly still be there. It's a dream job in every way except compensation.

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

#147

Post by johnwalkr »

smueller1234 wrote: post #94

Booking.com was acquired by Priceline for 100M in 2005. Now it's >80% of value and revenue of the parent company. By that logic, booking's value peaked over 80b$. I was there from 2010-2017. The philosophy of the holdings was to let its constituent companies execute independently and even compete (this included Priceline.com, Agoda, Kayak, rentalcars.com, OpenTable, etc). Therefore the culture of booking.com remained…

I almost forgot about the original Priceline. It used to offer up to 75% discounts on premium hotel rooms.. if you were willing to take the risk on getting a midrange room for a 10% discount or 20 minute walk from a metro station. The gambling component was fun and you could avoid those risks easily using VPNs. That experience is diluted and now is much less than the value of booking direct and membership points for me.

Booking.com is still good though. I always use it for my first search for accommodation, then reserve using booking.com, or direct with a hotel depending on which one has the best cancellation/change policy. That is still so important due to COVID and frequent flight cancellations.

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

#149

Post by PAPPPmAc »

rvense wrote: post #111
chubot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Carbon itself was a concession, if you look at the earlier Rhapsody and OS X Server releases, it was pretty clear that they were planning on using the "Yellow Box" environment (Basically OpenStep) as the primary system, with the "Blue Box" emulation layer as the only way to run Classic software. Then a revolt from developers (apparently especially Adobe and Microsoft) and the reality of how much a Display PostScript license would cost relative to a PC set in, and OS X happened with it's in-house windowing system and Carbon for easy porting of well-behaved Classic software. See http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7...

Also, early versions of OS X (IIRC though 10.4) were perfectly happy to install and work on UFS, the installer would even help you do so.

From the user end, the problem with running OSX on UFS was that... a bunch of sloppy software broke on case-sensitive volumes. Famously, Adobe's entire suite wouldn't even install on case-sensitive volumes (see https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-case-sensiti... I think it's still unfixed to this day). This is probably also the reason why despite Apple finally getting a modern file system... APFS has and defaults to a case-insensitive mode in opposition to essentially every other modern FS.

Post reply on HN