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A lesson from Palm, Nokia, Motorola, and every other small-to-midsize company in the Telco arena: Never let yourselves be acquired. It won't end well.
by AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
A lesson from Palm, Nokia, Motorola, and every other small-to-midsize company in the Telco arena: Never let yourselves be acquired. It won't end well.
- Aoyagi 10y agoI don't think this is telco-specific...
- manojlds 10y agoFirebase, WhatsApp and Instagram have been good.
- varjag 10y agoAndroid isn't much worse off..
- Jtsummers 10y agoTo be fair, Android wasn't established when it was acquired. It was still in early stages and not released in production devices. Google took it there (by financing, management or what, I don't know, but it happened after they acquired it).
- varjag 10y agoYeah well, the GP post mentions "small to midsize telco" companies, so Android was definitely small. (on the other hand it implies the behemoth of Nokia was "midsize", uh)
- slavik81 10y agoNokia was a disaster for years before Microsoft bought them. Given that the alternative appears to have been a steady decline into bankruptcy, I think Nokia did pretty well for themselves in that deal. They sold the company for a lot more than it was worth.
- jpalomaki 10y agoFor Nokia this turned out to be a good deal. They got good money for the mobile phone business. If they would have sticked to it that might have been the end of the whole company. Now Nokia got several billions, bought Alcatel and continues other business. The feature phone business ended up in new company which is using Nokia's name and IPR and pays per unit royalties to Nokia. If this venture proves succesful, Nokia could just acquire them. Years ago there was speculation that Elop was a trojan horse, placed by Microsoft. After things turned out as they did, I have started thinking that maybe it was the other way round. Maybe somebody planned all along that hiring Elop would open the opportunity of dumping the business to Microsoft in case it would nit start generating profits.
- pjmlp 10y agoThe Finn press discovered that the Nokia board had offered a contract to Elop where he would get a large bonus if he managed to sell the company. This was talked a lot in Finland, you can easily find it if you google for it, but Microsoft haters like to ignore this little action from Nokia board.
- nihonde 10y agoApple could easily have agreed to an acquisition in the 1990s. It takes true serious chutzpah and goodwill to nose up from a failing product line.
- dmix 10y ago> serious chutzpah and goodwill to nose up from a failing product line The bigger question is maintaining a controlling interest. VCs love quick easy exits. Seems to be the default pattern these days which is sad. And we wonder why so few long-term large scale businesses get created in SV these days.
- mbesto 10y ago> Never let yourselves be acquired. Ha. Tell that to someone who's about to make millions of dollars from an acquisition.
- djsumdog 10y agoTwitPic had a massive offer from Twitter when it was young. They declined and years later, Twitter tried to take them down. They settled to just make Twitpic read-only.