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The first group that benefits from large tech company acquisitions is end users. The fastest possible way for a new technology or feature to be diffused to user

The first group that benefits from large tech company acquisitions is end users. The fastest possible way for a new technology or feature to be diffused to users broadly is for it to be incorporated by one of the large platforms or Aggregators. Suddenly, instead of reaching a few thousand or even a few million people, a new technology can reach billions of people. It’s difficult to overstate how compelling this point is from a consumer welfare perspective: banning acquisitions means denying billions of people access to a particular technology for years, if not forever. This really seems like a stretch. First, its assumed that the actual features make it into a product again or the company is not simply shutdown and the current less-than-great feature is left in place (NIH). This is the web and great things spread, the whole last line is just really sounds like fear-mongering.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
right, I'm not even sure if this the first group is statistically accurate, there seems to be too many small companies bought and shut down to really assume this. It would be an interesting study to see what percentage of products last after purchase, for how long, how many are incorporated, and so forth.
sturgill 7y ago
My interpretation of this is that this group is mostly the acquihires. He’s looking at this specifically from the Instagram view, where the product continues. Obviously many projects are shuttered (“Our Wonderful Journey”) but I don’t think that’s what he’s addressing in this point.
- protomyth 7y ago
  I believe Instagram is the perfect counter-example to his whole thesis of helping the users. Instagram would have been just as popular, and one could even make the argument that they would have done better without Facebook because of the negative feeling of association.
  - satyrnein 7y ago
    If not for Facebook, wouldn't their roadmap have been self service ad buying, ad analytics, etc, instead of refining the consumer side?
  - maest 7y ago
    There's also the question of whether Instagram is a net positive by itself.
  - jacobr1 7y ago
    I would hazard that before the "FROM FACEBOOK" branding last year the majority of users didn't even know it was a facebook property. And even now I bet a large plurality don't know and the majority of the rest don't care.
satyrnein 7y ago
A former employer bought many competitors and sunset the product each time, because it was cheaper to rebuild the missing features than keep the whole product alive, especially when it did roughly the same thing as the acquirer's product. This seemed logical but also a waste. Given that a likely outcome for any new company is acquisition, is there a way to make your technology friendlier to an acquirer? Even microservice architectures seem to usually have assumptions about users and other core concepts. I want it to be possible to just staple the features on, like the business folks already assume is possible.
- theptip 7y ago
  It’s an interesting thought; I suspect building microservices with well specified APIs (OpenAPI / gRPC) and a common api onto the infrastructure layer (Kubernetes) would be a compelling way to do so. I.e. spend some time being cloud-agnostic.
codingslave 7y ago
Honestly this seems like an effort to create a clever alternative theory just for the sake of novelty. This blog has an incentive to produce "hidden" information. This specific example is really contrived.
tsycho 7y ago
Small startups experiment with novel ideas, workflows and products (in a 1000 flowers blooming way). The successful subset of these that survive, get merged/molded/copied by BigTech, and acquisitions are one of the ways to do that. More importantly, from Ben's other two points, if there were fewer startups because the expected return from investments reduce, end users lose because many of these novel ideas/products never come to market. BigTech can innovate much more slowly since they can only pick and choose a few of these ideas (even if they manage to come up with them).

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

right, I'm not even sure if this the first group is statistically accurate, there seems to be too many small companies bought and shut down to really assume this. It would be an interesting study to see what percentage of products last after purchase, for how long, how many are incorporated, and so forth.

sturgill 7y ago

My interpretation of this is that this group is mostly the acquihires. He’s looking at this specifically from the Instagram view, where the product continues. Obviously many projects are shuttered (“Our Wonderful Journey”) but I don’t think that’s what he’s addressing in this point.

protomyth 7y ago
I believe Instagram is the perfect counter-example to his whole thesis of helping the users. Instagram would have been just as popular, and one could even make the argument that they would have done better without Facebook because of the negative feeling of association.
- satyrnein 7y ago
  If not for Facebook, wouldn't their roadmap have been self service ad buying, ad analytics, etc, instead of refining the consumer side?
- maest 7y ago
  There's also the question of whether Instagram is a net positive by itself.
- jacobr1 7y ago
  I would hazard that before the "FROM FACEBOOK" branding last year the majority of users didn't even know it was a facebook property. And even now I bet a large plurality don't know and the majority of the rest don't care.

satyrnein 7y ago

A former employer bought many competitors and sunset the product each time, because it was cheaper to rebuild the missing features than keep the whole product alive, especially when it did roughly the same thing as the acquirer's product. This seemed logical but also a waste. Given that a likely outcome for any new company is acquisition, is there a way to make your technology friendlier to an acquirer? Even microservice architectures seem to usually have assumptions about users and other core concepts. I want it to be possible to just staple the features on, like the business folks already assume is possible.

theptip 7y ago
It’s an interesting thought; I suspect building microservices with well specified APIs (OpenAPI / gRPC) and a common api onto the infrastructure layer (Kubernetes) would be a compelling way to do so. I.e. spend some time being cloud-agnostic.

codingslave 7y ago

Honestly this seems like an effort to create a clever alternative theory just for the sake of novelty. This blog has an incentive to produce "hidden" information. This specific example is really contrived.

tsycho 7y ago

Small startups experiment with novel ideas, workflows and products (in a 1000 flowers blooming way). The successful subset of these that survive, get merged/molded/copied by BigTech, and acquisitions are one of the ways to do that. More importantly, from Ben's other two points, if there were fewer startups because the expected return from investments reduce, end users lose because many of these novel ideas/products never come to market. BigTech can innovate much more slowly since they can only pick and choose a few of these ideas (even if they manage to come up with them).