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> Just as the old industrial giants used technological innovations to reduce their costs, the new tech giants use technological innovations to expand their netw

• JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  It seems to me (unscientifically) that buying out generally kills a company/product. More about squashing competition and unifying a market, than innovation.
  • georgemcbay 10y ago
    "More about squashing competition and unifying a market, than innovation." I agree, it seems the same to me. Which is terrible (for consumers), of course. Even when they don't actually kill off the product, the products will often languish in a weird limbo where they are basically still around but effectively end-of-lifed on new features. For example, Google Voice, the Google Nik Collection of photography plugins etc. Google alone is sitting on a giant bunch of products/services that could be (and sometimes at one time were) paid products that they acquired, made free from cost (great!) and then just did absolutely nothing with in terms of advancing them (not so great!). Things that could be a wonderful small business, but aren't worth Google's time because the return for them wouldn't register at their scale. And the kicker is that because Google has these for free, it is really difficult for other companies to come in and try to make a competing product, because even if they make something that is significantly better, there's way more inertia in adoption from users because Google's free thing exists.