As a product manager at Right Media, I was personally pretty happy with our acquisition by Yahoo. Things gradually got more bureaucratic, but Yahoo gave out so

As a product manager at Right Media, I was personally pretty happy with our acquisition by Yahoo. Things gradually got more bureaucratic, but Yahoo gave out some very generous employee retention packages which effectively more than doubled my already pretty generous salary. When Microsoft came along and inflated Yahoo's stock with an acquisition offer, I thought it was Christmas. You better believe I sold every share I could the second I could. After a year of Yahoo, I had the savings in the bank to go off and start my first company with confidence. And if I hadn't wanted to start my own thing, another couple of years at Yahoo would've put me on a pretty nice financial footing. I'm quite pleased that acquisition happened, and I suspect most of the employees there feel the same way. I'll admit I'm not super sympathetic when people complain about their product's decline after being paid millions of dollars for it. del.icio.us was a pretty sweet bookmark manager, but for the lion's share of $27.5MM I'd happily cock it up with an acquisition.