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Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

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Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

#111

Post by apahwa »

lmm wrote: post #105
jfoster wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, does it become silly for the biggest companies to attempt their own solutions instead of just buying the one with the most traction or best implementation? One example might be how Amazon never got into self-driving cars themselves, but then last year bought Zoox.

There's no point in buying an unrelated business that you're going to leave operating as usual - you might as well just invest that money on the stock market instead, or pay it out to your shareholders. So presumably if a company is buying a solution to X then it believes it can gain a competitive advantage by integrating X into the rest of its business. Given that, I would've thought that the earlier you buy the thi…

can you name a business that is completely unrelated to Apple or Amazon and would not see significant benefits from being absorbed?

Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

#112

Post by humbledrone »

biztos wrote: post #51
humbledrone wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acquihires do often have employee upside, in the form of large stock-based compensation grants or bonus payouts, typically spread over a vesting period of several years. There's no point in the acquihire if you don't retain the employees, and relative to the cost to acquire the company these payouts aren't huge. You're right that often people do have to interview to remain employed (and thus to receive these benefits…

> do have to interview to remain employed Would that be a full-on interview as if they were applying for a job, or just some kind of "cultural fit" screening? It seems contradictory to me: if the hire is important enough to spend a lot of money on (even via an earn-out) then why alienate them with uncertainty about the offer? I guess the assumption is they don't have a better offer? But if a few key employees get tog…

It varies between no interview at all, and a full interview exactly like a new hire. Both are done. Interviews are more common these days, because if they're skipped, existing employees may resent the acquihire folks for not having to jump through the same hoops.

This is another reason for the vesting payouts for employees. If there wasn't some reward, and you had to do a full interview, why not just interview somewhere else?

Regarding your last question, it is true that a cabal of disgruntled employees could cause problems for an acquihire. I have seen cases where the acquisition was contingent on a certain number of engineers passing the interviews. Another good reason for a big financial incentive.

I don't think that would lead to better terms in a new deal. The next buyer is likely to learn that the company's employees boned the interviews, which is going to look bad.

Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

#113

Post by why_only_15 »

threeseed wrote: post #32
veenusav wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the example of Tesla 2013. Apple is not hiring to keep the startup or the innovation. But for the up or even worst:for the talent. Its like selling your house to the scrap guy

It entirely depends on the company. - Turi became TuriCreate/CoreML - Faceshift became Memoji - Workflow became Shortcuts - FoundationDB is unchanged and underpins iCloud - Shazam is unchanged Many of the acquired companies can be directly seen in shipping products ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... )

Worfklow is maybe one of my favorite acquisitions by them because it's far easier to run something like this as an OS-level daemon with OS-level permissions than a third-party app. Funnily enough, the Workflow team was folded into Proactive Intelligence, i.e. the old Cue team, another startup that was essentially acquihired for the same reason. Cue was trying to extract all kinds of information from your email, but it turns out you need more than email, which is possible when you run as an OS-level daemon.

Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

#114

Post by zaphirplane »

apahwa wrote: post #111
lmm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no point in buying an unrelated business that you're going to leave operating as usual - you might as well just invest that money on the stock market instead, or pay it out to your shareholders. So presumably if a company is buying a solution to X then it believes it can gain a competitive advantage by integrating X into the rest of its business. Given that, I would've thought that the earlier you buy the thi…

can you name a business that is completely unrelated to Apple or Amazon and would not see significant benefits from being absorbed?

For apple :- a farm, cattle station, cement factory, brick maker, carpets, upholstery, chicken farm the list goes on

Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

#115

Post by m463 »

jfoster wrote: post #90
qbasic_forever wrote: post #9

So ~15 companies a year? That doesn't sound outrageous for a company with billions and billions of dollars in the bank, and billions more coming in every quarter. edit: If anything there's probably immense pressure on Cook to buy buy buy more stuff. I don't think anyone inside Apple wants to have a repeat of stuff like old Apple maps or other products that just languished and died internally while external companies…

At some point, does it become silly for the biggest companies to attempt their own solutions instead of just buying the one with the most traction or best implementation? One example might be how Amazon never got into self-driving cars themselves, but then last year bought Zoox.

I think it has an effect on people working for apple.

At some point acquiring other companies will affect the ability to hire and retain developers. It might also be a clue that their ability is diminished, or that internal ideas are not being promoted - whatever process Steve Jobs used to bring the good stuff to light.

Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

#116

Post by root_axis »

PierceJoy wrote: post #97
root_axis wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean this to sound snarky so I hope you don't interpret it that way, but I think the flow of the conversation makes more sense if you read from my original comment. I was only responding to what was written to me. I made the point about Apple's acquisition behavior because the reply to my original comment suggested my observations could be explained by the cost of Apple's acquisitions as compared to other exa…

If you were never trying to debate Apple's acquisition practises, then you probably shouldn't have participated in the debate about them. Someone else started it, yes, but you then replied to them. That makes it fair to respond to your reply and address the contents of that reply. You directly commented on how Apple assimilates their acquisitions, and implied others do not. That is what I am addressing. I completely…

I don't feel insulted, it is simply a statement of fact that I did not cherry-pick since I did not pick those examples at all. I did not presume you were suggesting I "did on purpose" what was done by someone else.

Of course you're free to respond to my comment, but I certainly did not imply that others do not assimilate their acquisitions (such is an obvious falsehood), I simply compared Apple's acquisitions to the examples offered to me in comparison. I understand you take issue with those examples but once again, they're not my examples.

Anyway, we're just going in circles at this point, I'm gonna bow out here. Have a nice night.

Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

#117

Post by purpmint008 »

Karunamon wrote: post #106
purpmint008 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am well-aware of these. The issue is the joint-packaging. If we went hard on Microsoft for packaging IE and WMP into Windows, we should go equally ballistic about iMessage and SMS being fused in together. They should be broken up.

We didn't "go hard on" Microsoft for mere bundling of basic tools like media viewers and web browsers. It was because they were using that dominant position (which is perfectly fine to have) to behave anticompetitively (which is not).

> "behave anticompetitively"

What is Apple doing when it bundles iMessage and SMS together? Deception and anti-competitive behavior, that's what!

Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

#118

Post by lmm »

apahwa wrote: post #111
lmm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no point in buying an unrelated business that you're going to leave operating as usual - you might as well just invest that money on the stock market instead, or pay it out to your shareholders. So presumably if a company is buying a solution to X then it believes it can gain a competitive advantage by integrating X into the rest of its business. Given that, I would've thought that the earlier you buy the thi…

can you name a business that is completely unrelated to Apple or Amazon and would not see significant benefits from being absorbed?

The way I'd think about it is "would that business put any time into a partnership with Apple/Amazon if the chance came up". I guess you could argue that any business above a certain size would consider them worth talking to for some kind of cross-promotional deal even if that doesn't make a lot of sense on the face of it - Caterpillar? Hilton? But I think small focused companies outside of Apple/Amazon's core field wouldn't want to spend time on something like that. So B2B, non-tech, smallish companies - which by their very nature I can't name a lot of, but there's a lot of them out there.

Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

#119

Post by root_axis »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #102
jfoster wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, does it become silly for the biggest companies to attempt their own solutions instead of just buying the one with the most traction or best implementation? One example might be how Amazon never got into self-driving cars themselves, but then last year bought Zoox.

I work in health care. I also work for one of the biggest health care companies in the world. They are losing market share to smaller, more agile companies. Smaller companies who can whip out apps and solutions way faster than the company I work for. Their solution is to buy the companies whose technology they want to leverage for their own, similar to what Apple is doing. This is a good tactic, but then creates anot…

I suppose it all depends on the extant in-house expertise. If you're in a "we don't know what we don't know" situation with respect to the problem, it's less risky to buy the experts with a proven record rather than spend an indefinite amount of time and money on R&D which might not yield success. Integrating into a familiar bureaucracy is at least the devil you know

Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

#120

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

fpo wrote: post #16
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a lifestyle business is bought-out, assuming the employees are also significant equity stakeholders, do they typically get compensated for the loss of expected lifetime earnings - and/or a contractual right to buy back their IP from Apple, given that an acqui-hire is not guaranteed to be in the employees’ best-interests - or be long-lasting? Just asking - because if my company were to be acqui-hired I have serio…

They wouldn't extend an offer to you in this case. Acqui-hires have no upside for employees and barely any for founders. Some small return to investors to sign off on the acquihire. Usually most people still have to interview for their jobs.

The hypothetical case I was describing was when the employees (say, 1-5 people) are also the sole shareholders.

Supposing I write a _killer app_ with a friend and get a patent for it - and it ends up with tens of millions of users quickly - and Apple really wants it for themselves at short notice (too short a notice for them to try to recreate the software code, sic their legal team to invalidate the patent and market it to get enough users) - how far would Apple bend to accommodate my _think different_ attitude?

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