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 that their company's infrastructure and culture aren't going to work at a large scale, so they would rather offload the task of turning into a big company to somebody who already knows how to do that. But, even if they hadn't, they usually would have had to turn into something that looked a lot like the big company they got acquired by, anyway.
Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
81–90 of 173 posts
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#82Oracle acquiring Sun. I know there is a lot of Oracle hate but: MySQL, GraalVM (Java), Sun hardware (both Exa* and SPARC), VirtualBox and many more technologies are better today than prior. The challenge Sun would have had, regardless of Oracle or not, is that they were solidly in the On-Prem business ... and the market has moved to Cloud.
Even on the remaining on-prem market, who's still using MySQL over MariaDB or Postgres? Who's using SPARC over X64? Who's using Virtualbox over HyperV, Libvirt or VMWare?
> Who's using SPARC over X64?
A lot of telecoms stuff.
> Who's using Virtualbox over HyperV, Libvirt or VMWare?
A considerable number of people who want an open source virtualization solution that is relatively painless to use (so, not libvirt).
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah. Might have to watch it then. After a number of duds I gave up on watching new Pixar movies except for those made by Brad Bird, or especially recommended.
Coco and Turning Red were excellent. The rest of your list however, proves you more right than wrong.
I'd argue the only real misses were the cash grab sequels (Cars 2, Cars 3, and I can only assume Lightyear is in that group but looking at RT it seems like both ratings are still "fresh"). The rest of the movies on the post-acquisition list were good, if not great. Critically, I think the worst one on the list is the Good Dinosaur and even that's still generally well liked.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#84Oracle acquiring Sun. I know there is a lot of Oracle hate but: MySQL, GraalVM (Java), Sun hardware (both Exa* and SPARC), VirtualBox and many more technologies are better today than prior. The challenge Sun would have had, regardless of Oracle or not, is that they were solidly in the On-Prem business ... and the market has moved to Cloud.
Even on the remaining on-prem market, who's still using MySQL over MariaDB or Postgres? Who's using SPARC over X64? Who's using Virtualbox over HyperV, Libvirt or VMWare?
More people are using MySQL over mariaDB and postgres install base is a fraction of mysql.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#85Amazon 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?
Counter-point: Amazon bought Mobipocket in 2005, the guys who created the MOBI e-book format, turned the mobi format into their AZW format for Kindle books, then shut Mobipocket down.[0]
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#86Instagram and WhatsApp (so far)? Smaller scale: Condé Nast didn’t ruin Reddit for the most part.
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Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm guessing that being part of a much larger company allows them to spend more time on UX and "the little big details" that might not directly contribute to profits.
Maybe Github Actions has brought in a lot more revenue, too. They get a "discount" on Azure hosting, I'm sure.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the example, but can you say that NeXT was a large acquisition for Apple? How big was NeXT compared to Apple? Does size matter in this analysis? I believe so. I don't know much about this particular acquisition, but I always assumed that buying NeXT was the price to get Jobs back.
I've seen and used the phrase "NeXT bought Apple with Apple's money" for that acquisition, they didn't just replace Gil Amelio with Steve Jobs, they also had a huge fraction of their management and tech leads swapped out with NeXT folk in pretty short order. They also turned over a huge number of board members in '96-97 as Apple flailed then reformed. Apple spent $429M on NeXT (Apples market cap at the time was aroun…
Thank you so so so much for this detailed history! I love the people webs that exist around some of our favorite tech.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#89BEA's acquisition of WebLogic and Oracle's acquisition of BEA (at that point, basically WebLogic).
Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?
#90BEA's acquisition of WebLogic and Oracle's acquisition of BEA (at that point, basically WebLogic).
I might only half-jokingly say that these acquisitions did not ruin the company because they were already too terrible to be ruined...