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Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

• RubberShoes 4y ago
  Google acquiring YouTube "In the Plex" by Steven Levy goes into great detail on how YouTube could not survive its growth without the infrastructure and ad technologies Google brought to the platform.
  • paulgb 4y ago
    I realize OP is talking more about the experience of the workers than the users, and I don't have an inside scoop here, but I'd put forward “Google acquiring Keyhole” as well. Google was in a unique position to allow anyone with a browser to view satellite photos from around the world, for free, and have the economics make sense for them.
    • splonk 4y ago
      I have a somewhat inside scoop from working with various early Keyhole employees, and my impression is that they were generally happy with the acquisition. At the very least, quite a few of them stuck around long past the golden handcuffs stage.
  • jessriedel 4y ago
    That's an argument for the acquisition of YT by Google being net positive, but it doesn't answer the OP's question, which he specifically restricts to the "less tangible parts of the smaller company".
    • macspoofing 4y ago
      >but it doesn't answer the OP's question I think it does, otherwise OP's question is ill-posed. That is, if YouTube scaled independently from a scrappy startup to a $170billion behemoth, the changes in corporate governance and culture would have been equally as drastic as being acquired by Google.
      • aliqot 4y ago
        Youtube, the product, maybe makes more money. However, Youtube, the community, was much better initially, which I suppose can be expected with most communities as they grow. Bad actors creep in, which creates new rules, which negatively impacts the whole, which causes resentment, which causes more bad actors, which lead to more rules, and before you know it, review-girls don't seem so bad when your feed lands on terrorist-mickeymouse and the syringe babies.
        • joshuamorton 4y ago
          Youtube only existed publicly for around a year before being acquired. I don't think it supported comments on videos. Whether or not YT's community was better early on (which like, I'm not even sure is true) is independent from whether its acquisition by Google affected that community, because YT was acquired basically before there was any chance for a community to develop.
      • jessriedel 4y ago
        That's a new claim not made in the comment I replied to (and arguably still not really answering the question, which is definitely not ill-posed).
        • aliswe 4y ago
          totally unnecessary argument there bro. just take it as it comes, no need to respond and dissect everything.
    • cleansingfire 4y ago
  • olalonde 4y ago
    Also Android.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• neilk 4y ago
  Salesforce recently acquired Tableau and from what I hear the acquisition has probably improved things at Tableau. This is a very special case though! Tableau is a company with a lot of Fortune 500 buy-in, but an aging development stack and business model. So this is the case of a somewhat more dynamic larger company acquiring a set of customers and some fundamental tech. Usually acquisitions are from big/slow/established/monopoly acquiring an upstart and it’s no surprise that usually ends up badly.
  • digb 4y ago
    Having previously worked at SFDC, I would not wager that it's much more dynamic than Tableau.
  • arama471 4y ago
    I worked at Tableau until very recently and I can't think of any way that the Salesforce acquisition has improved things yet (I do think it will eventually improve things). Did you hear about anything specific?
    • dsaavy 4y ago
      I've been working with Tableau for around 10 years and the most noticeable thing was making it easier for both developers and end-users to use the platform. Everything from mobile, to toolbar improvements, alerts, the API, etc. seem to have really come together. Now, these could all have very well been in development before the acquisition, but as a whole, the capabilities have grown tremendously since that time. Also, it seems like the licensing options for smaller businesses has really been focused on since the acquisition. It's become much more affordable for a small business to get and use Tableau compared to 4-5 years ago.
• superb-owl 4y ago
  This sounds more like small company vs big company culture, rather than specifically the effects of acquisition. Some folks are much happier at a small, nimble company. Some folks like the stability and predictability of a larger company. Sounds like you're in the former camp. There are cases where the acquired company is left to run more-or-less independently, and its stock is just owned (or majority-owned) by the acquirer. But that's probably the exception rather than the rule. Usually, if you get acquired, you're now an employee of Big Co.
• InTheArena 4y ago
  NeXT with Apple is a pretty solid canonical case. In that situation, it really became a reverse acquisition with Steve Jobs regaining control of Apple. We've done a number of acquisitions - and most seem to have done well. A big portion of that is recognizing that you are not only acquiring the company - it's IP and people - but also it's culture. If you don't want that culture - if it's not better then yours, you don't want it.
  • fredguth 4y ago
    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.
    • jjoonathan 4y ago
      Aren't half the UI classes in OSX still prefixed with "NS" for NextStep?
      • chubot 4y ago
        Yeah my understanding is that most of the OS X team were from Next, so Apple definitely got something out of the acquisition
        • rvense 4y ago
          OS X was an upgraded NeXTStep (including an all-new GUI and printing subsystem) with the addition of two ways of running old Mac applications: Classic mode, which was a full OS9 environment running under hardware virtualization, and the Carbon APIs, which were a set of upgraded but mostly-compatible C/C++ APIs that allowed Mac applications from the last decade and a half to be carried forward. These APIs survived for about ten years, and while they were not completely frozen in time, there was always a feeling that they were the second-class, legacy choice compared to the "native" alternative, Cocoa. There was never a 64-bit Carbon, so running (much less compiling) Carbon apps has been impossible for quite some time now. The Objective-C Cocoa APIs are a straight descendant of the NeXTStep APIs, and many NeXT apps would run on OS X with a simple recompile. While there have been many additions since, and the main focus these days is on the Swift language, to the best of my knowledge, you can still take an Objective-C NeXT application and compile it on your ARMintosh and have it run with very few issues. I was a Mac user from 1989, and I didn't like OS X much at the time. It felt like a completely new system, not an update to what I was used to. Sure, it was better in many technical ways, but it was also a lot more complicated. And it felt different. So there were was definitely a sense that it was really a Mac anymore. Just about the only technical concession to the old Mac crowd that I can think of was the use of the old HFS+ file system, over NeXT's UNIX filesystem. And I think this was only because there was a transition period of several years where dual-booting was common, even necessary. So you could install OS X next to your old OS 9 system and boot either at your discretion without having to have several partitions. Mac OS9 is very dependent on some features in its FS, so this was the only way to allow a smooth transition. But other than that, OS X was and felt like a new, alien system, even though it did allow for compatibility with many applications.
• countvonbalzac 4y ago
  Instagram ($1 billion), WhatsApp ($19 billion)
  • skciva 4y ago
    Obviously we'll never know but I'd love to see an alternate timeline where those acquisitions didn't happen. Instagram specifically has just become another ad infested shopping app for me these days.
    • pgwhalen 4y ago
      I'm not a meaningful Instagram user nor would I defend it as "good", but from a "success" perspective, for my demographic (I'm a 30-something US resident), it is clearly the most relevant social network.
• CoastalCoder 4y ago
  Not an expert, but I'm curious if one difference between the buyer and buyee (in the author's situations) is SOCS2 compliance.
• Clubber 4y ago
  >I find that everything we enjoyed is gone. Perks slowly disappear; meetings, trainings, and general wastes of time increase; productivity slows; engineers become demoralized; processes grind through bureaucracy. As I understand it, this is typical. The first time I was in a company that got acquired, this happened. Then it got acquired again by an even bigger fish and it didn't really happen because it already sucked after the first time. The second company that got acquired it also happened. Usually the suck starts after a year when managers try to increase their bonuses by finding "synergies," which really means cutting employees through consolidation and adding a bunch of unnecessary friction to the development process. The lesson I've learned is if you get acquired, you've got about a year to get out or you will be miserable if you aren't the big-co type. I made the mistake of staying too long both times it's happened to me. To answer your question, I've never been at a company that got acquired and it was better for me.
• otium 4y ago
  Twitch by Amazon($1 billion)
  • fredguth 4y ago
    What defines a big acquisition? Price or comparable size of the acquirer versus acquired?
  • ianbicking 4y ago
    Zappos and Whole Foods also seem to be operating very similarly under Amazon as they were before.
    • jerlam 4y ago
      Zappos is just a call center now. I visited their HQ in Vegas a while ago, all the fulfillment and product info is now done by Amazon.
• taylorwc 4y ago
  Pixar acquisition by Disney comes to mind
  • tpmx 4y ago
    Strong disagreement. The acquisition happened in 2006. The last few great Pixar movies were in the pipeline already (Ratatouille - 2007, WALL-E - 2008, Up - 2009).
    • no-dr-onboard 4y ago
      I disagree too from a animation/story-quality perspective, but from a business perspective, Pixar seems to be doing well enough to meet OPs criteria of not being ruined.
      • krageon 4y ago
        > but from a business perspective Nobody cares about this, the money they make isn't what other people interact with. It's the things they create.
    • xnx 4y ago
      Counterpoint: Inside Out, Soul
      • tpmx 4y ago
        Inside out was good, but not great, IMO. Counter-counterpoints: Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Cars 3, Coco, Onward, Luca, Turning Red, Lightyear. The (not very original) point is: You can no longer count on a Pixar movie being excellent.
        • cm2012 4y ago
          Coco was excellent. But agreed on the rest.
• alberth 4y ago
  Oracle 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.
  • silvestrov 4y ago
    The Java language has improved a lot since Oracle took over. It started to languish at Sun, like they didn't want to put any effort into it.
  • jedberg 4y ago
    Lol talk to anyone who was there and they would tell you that Oracle absolutely destroyed Sun.
    • alberth 4y ago
      I was there. Nothing destroyed. Just differences in company culture. The alternative for Sun was IBM to buy them. An acquisition by IBM would have been the death of Sun. Sun, under Oracle, still lives on well today.
      • pforret 4y ago
        Wasn’t Google interested? It would have given them tons of IP and might have saved them from the law suits Oracle brought over Android.
        • alberth 4y ago
          The only formal offer came from IBM, and then Oracle came in higher. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Technology/story?id=7395780&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Technology/story?id=7395780&page=...
        • jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
• skizm 4y ago
  Instagram and WhatsApp (so far)? Smaller scale: Condé Nast didn’t ruin Reddit for the most part.
  • dehrmann 4y ago
    Condé neglected reddit for a while, then spun it back out. I think they owned it for 5 years. While not good, neglect is arguably better than trying to change too much.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• theanirudh 4y ago
  YouTube
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• stagger87 4y ago
  This happens all the time. It is essentially the business strategy of many (not all!) conglomerates. Scoop up successful companies and let them keep running as they are, sometimes with even greater success due to things like access to money and peers. I've worked for a few subsidiaries through the acquisition process, and aside from some accountants showing up once a year, everything remained the same.
• iancmceachern 4y ago
  I have lots of examples where they ruined it.
  • aliswe 4y ago
    Thats interesting as well, care to tell?
• curiousllama 4y ago
  OP - Of your 5 criteria, 2 will change by the very nature of what it is to be acquired. The other 3 are essentially 1 (how excited are we about this change?) Culture: there's different people around, now. So culture necessarily changes. Flexibility: bigger companies are less flexible because there are simply more people. Even if every individual is more flexible, it doesn't matter. Enthusiasm, spirit, and happiness - are these not synonyms, in this context? And if they are, are they not reactions to external factors (culture & flexibility)? I would suggest your question may be tautological: big companies will always ruin small companies from the perspective of someone who likes small companies because the small company became big.
  • psim1 4y ago
    I think there's a finesse to it where the bigger company can in many ways adopt the smaller company culture, leave it alone, or bring in their own unique and not bad culture. Big != sucks, necessarily. Some of the other comments have insightful examples.
• kerblang 4y ago
  While not answering the question, I think a lot of companies are acquired in a state of immaturity and then comes the problem of succeeding as actual grownups. Everyone blames the acquirer but it's not that simple. I work with a group that still has leftover ego-execution mismatch and it's tiresome.
• onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Instagram?
• QuillianR 4y ago
  LVMH has purchased a lot of companies that have maintained success, but they are a holding company that runs companies more as independent subsidiaries. If software followed this model it might be alright, but most of the acquisitions by big companies are trying to merge the new company into the old, vs. buying, running and sustaining a company as a continuing business.
  • 0xPersona 4y ago
    John Collison explores this subject in an episode of Invest Like The Best [1]. He talks about conglomerates like LVMH and Danaher and how they often give managers of acquired companies latitude in how they operate. He also points out that no one in technology has done what is actually pretty common in the rest of the world, namely, one holding company for a whole bunch of independent businesses that are sharing expertise. A counterexample mentioned is Constellation Software [2] which owns about 500 businesses. I definitely think this style of business is underrated and will grow in popularity. The whole episode is brilliant, full of great insights that I think about often. It's well worth a listen. [1] https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/34646260/collison-growing-the-internet-economy https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/34646260/collison-grow... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_Software
• randomly123 4y ago
  https://www.motherson.com/company/history https://www.motherson.com/company/history This company does decent M&A in the auto ancilliaries industry
• open-source-ux 4y ago
  Amazon 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?
  • influx 4y ago
    You left out Amazing acquiring IMDB in 1998! Hasn't changed much since then. Likewise woot.com in 2010.
    • krallja 4y ago
      woot.com is not a good example of company culture staying good. The employees got so fed up, they left and started meh.com, which seems to be just “woot.com again.”
    • skinnymuch 4y ago
      In more recent years, someone within the Amazon org chart ruined Box Office Mojo for IMDB. The shutting down of the forums seemed unnecessary too. Both seem to have been done to push IMDB as a more professional site for sales.
  • AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
    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] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobipocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobipocket
• harel 4y ago
  I think github got better after Microsoft bought them. They were in some stale rut for a long time before that.
  • moolcool 4y ago
    I agree, but this is a hot take among a lot of free software purists.
    • harel 4y ago
      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?
      • FinalBriefing 4y ago
        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.
    • aliqot 4y ago
      Not sure whether I'd be labeled a purist, but I've been stdlib only for a while now, and tend to choose the open choice over the left hand path of the corporate capitalist patriarchy, I wouldn't call myself outright biased though ( I kid. ) However, all jests aside, being a relatively open source person, I haven't seen much in the git product of Github getting any worse after Microsoft acquired them. The social aspect, well, it is what it is, and I don't care for it, but I don't necessarily think my preferences translate well to a quarterly earnings call. I do personally perceive the downtime to be more frequent now, but maybe only because it's more publicized, I do not have any data to substantiate that personal observation.
  • eatonphil 4y ago
    Yep I agree. And unlike where lots of acquisitions die down after years even if they do ok initially, it's taken years but Github finally seems to be increasing the pace of innovation.
• seaourfreed 4y ago
  Android, AdWords, MS DOS was acquired for $70k, instagram
• vannevar 4y ago
  I don't know what it's like from the inside, but from the outside the acquisition of Oculus by Facebook has gone much better than I expected. I really thought Oculus would be gone within a year, but they've continued to put out some great products. Other than the misstep about requiring Facebook accounts, it seems like a success.
• bdcravens 4y ago
  At least in the case of (many) startups, most are built with acquisition in mind. Many time perks are there only to attract talent to get the company to the exit, but aren't part of the long term business plan.
• terravion 4y ago
  Deloitte's acquisition of BearingPoint's Federal practice in 2008-9. Fascinating to watch from the inside -- literally the same people increased revenue & margins with happier employees, primarily driven by implementing a better management and incentives culture with better HR practices. Also interesting that Deloitte hired their corporate M&A integration group to run the integration for themselves.
• wiseleo 4y ago
  Cisco's acquisitions. There's a book about them. The Crescendo switch acquisition was extremely successful and they became Catalyst switches.
  • pea 4y ago
    Cisco has an interesting playbook with spin-outs as well, that I haven't seen many companies pull off (i.e. mpls multiple times over)
• kodah 4y ago
  Salesforce's acquisition of Slack, possibly. A good portion of folks I know don't even know Slack was acquired, which is a good sign.
  • Mandatum 4y ago
    They haven't changed anything. Yet. Dreamforce isn't for a few more months. Also Slack and Salesforce's culture is very different. Salesforce is closer to Oracle, Slack always had super-technical, friendly sales and support staff. I'm sure we'll see price hikes and a push to land larger, government and Enterprise contracts as they forget about SME.
• gilbetron 4y ago
  Cisco bought Duo Security, and by all accounts from the people I know that work there, the culture is pretty intact and people happy. Maybe that has changed in the past year or so, though!
• simonw 4y ago
  Sadly Heroku/Salesforce used to be my go-to-example here, but that fell apart a few years ago when they effectively froze new feature development.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• stedman 4y ago
  The Acquired podcast does case studies of successful acquisitions: https://www.acquired.fm/ https://www.acquired.fm/ It's an amazing show
• rossdavidh 4y ago
  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.
  • mekoka 4y ago
    Sometimes you just get acquired because "large sums of money". Some startups are on their way way up, with spare room to improve on their value proposition and mission at the time of their acquisition, and it's difficult to know what the road not traveled would've looked like. Even if you see improvements post-acquisition, you can't tell if the acquisition actually stifled the potential. For some of the companies lauded in this very thread, I'd argue that's the case.
  • waynesonfire 4y ago
    This is such bs. Why do you have to grow so fast? Wtf. Stop taking loans and having to sell your soul to get out.
    • mikercampbell 4y ago
      The best way to do X is to do it as hard as possible until it becomes Y overnight. Haha I joke, but seriously. I was cramming my way to the finish line of my startup idea when I realized I didn't need to. HN showed me that side-gigs can be as big or small as you want or need them to be, customers be willing.
    • rossdavidh 4y ago
      Well you don't _have_ to grow fast. But a slow-growing or not-growing company also has a very different feel. Fast-growing companies have lots of room for growth for everyone who works there, because there are new positions and new responsibilities opening up all the time. Slow-growing companies have less of that, so somebody else has to leave or die before you get a chance to move up. Sometimes, this is still better than the problems of fast growth, but it is a tradeoff. Also, if you took VC money to start the company in the first place, then you may require fast growth in order to offer some prospect of a return to the people who invested with you. Similarly, if you maxed out your credit cards and took loans from family to get going, you need/want to grow fast to pay that back. Not every small company is in that situation, but many of them are.
• spullara 4y ago
  BEA's acquisition of WebLogic and Oracle's acquisition of BEA (at that point, basically WebLogic).
  • zippergz 4y ago
    I might only half-jokingly say that these acquisitions did not ruin the company because they were already too terrible to be ruined...
• varjag 4y ago
  GitHub, LinkedIn
• dev_by_day 4y ago
  Trello by Atlassian. They have tried to rollout some of the UX improvements from Trello into other products and kept the majority of the talent.
• smueller1234 4y ago
  Booking.com was acquired by Priceline for 100M in 2005. Now it's >80% of value and revenue of the parent company. By that logic, booking's value peaked over 80b$. I was there from 2010-2017. The philosophy of the holdings was to let its constituent companies execute independently and even compete (this included Priceline.com, Agoda, Kayak, rentalcars.com, OpenTable, etc). Therefore the culture of booking.com remained fairly intact for a very long time.
  • skinnymuch 4y ago
    Purely acquisitions/mergers, Booking.com has to be a best tech one in the modern era, if not ever. After Instagram. YouTube and Doubleclick are the others that fit in a top 5. By 2010, was Booking.com seen as the essential core of Priceline? Were the people leading the overall company and/or Booking decisions, Priceline people or Booking.com people?
    • smueller1234 4y ago
      Agreed, that was a legendary acquisition. That being said, I think it was not a mistake for the previous owner(s) to sell at the time. Priceline had cash, and the marketing heavy ("buy ads in January, stay in summer, bill hotel at the end of the month after the stay") business had significant cash flow challenges in terms of growth. When I joined in late 2010, Booking still seemed to be viewed as a bit of a poorly understood miracle by the group folks, growing nearly 2x every year. Certainly the engineering department was so much less... corporate... than the mothership's that we were sometimes referred to as the cowboys in Amsterdam. Shortly thereafter, they hired Darren Huston to run Booking, who relatively soon after that (like 24 months? I'm sure Google search will find that answer) also became the group CEO, all based in Amsterdam. At the latest then, Booking would have been officially the core of the company, even though it had been the growth motor for well longer. Historically, the benefits offered by Priceline group to booking were IMO chiefly aforementioned cash flow for growth, and shared technical infrastructure (WAN, shared colo space). Booking had outgrown the group infrastructure team's ability to scale. The perpetual culture clash eventually led to the central infrastructure group being broken up (very much an outcome driven by the booking CTO, Brendan Bank). So we built our own network and DC team since we had far, far outgrown the infrastructure needs of other group companies. For a long time, Booking was so focused on only doing things that were strictly measurable and attributable that we didn't do any brand advertising or classical marketing (cf. quantitative fallacy). We co-grew with Google search ads in particular and had built very significant tooling around AdWords since the Google provided infrastructure didn't scale. Unofficially, we were the largest ads customer for a long time spending billions annually at useful ROI. This "stealth mode" meant that we weren't getting a lot of DDoS type threats to deal with for example and likely less fraud risk. It also meant that we always chuckled in earnings calls when analysts praised the "Priceline business being very successful overseas". Eventually reality caught up and PCLN became BKNG - Booking Holdings. 'twas a wild ride. Not always fun but chock full of learning. AMA if you like.
• dev_by_day 4y ago
  Zappos by Amazon. I've heard they gave them a fair amount of autonomy and have been supportive.
• throwaway931 4y ago
  VMware's acquisition by EMC went well for most of the employees (at least during the initial years). For all practical purposes, EMC left VMware alone.
• amf12 4y ago
  Linkedin and Github acquisition by Microsoft. Github and Linkedin both have their own culture, perks, and the companies are run independently. Infact, Linkedin pays better than Microsoft and are overall happier.
  • skinnymuch 4y ago
    LinkedIn is and was a massive purchase too compared to most other examples.
• iainctduncan 4y ago
  (background: I work in tech mergers and acquisitions for a company that does pre-acquisition diligence.) It is worth noting that, most of the time, the things that are so wonderful about working at the small company are fun for all the same reasons that they aren't sustainable. Most startups are not cash positive - they don't make money, they just lose money more slowly than they get investment (by selling off bits of the company). So very often, the stuff you want to have continue just can't because it was based on imaginary income. The exit plan always involves the company becoming profitable at some point (maybe after multiple rounds of acquisitions) and that usually means that on each round the company has to become more realistic about how they spend their money, including how they manage their devs. On the other hand, it's true that a small lifestyle company can keep many of those things, but they do that by not having a plan to sell, which tends to mean you get the spirit and independence but not the throwing-around-cash-like-it-was-free fun times. When you factor in opportunity-cost, the whole office plays lazer tag on friday is really bloody expensive.
  • stevage 4y ago
    How do Google and Facebook etc manage it then?
    • iainctduncan 4y ago
      Note that I said "most of the time". Google and Facebook are so far off the usual scenarios for startups and acquisitions that it's not even relevant. We do hundreds of acquisition diligences a year and the FAANG playbook is a whole different beast from the vast majority of acquisitions.
• Noe2097 4y ago
  Dassault Systèmes acquiring Solidworks. Most users don't know that Solidworks, which is well know as a mid level solution for CAD, is actually owned by the French company developing CATIA, which is practically used by every single serious manufacturer in the world (from automotive to aircraft to ship to factory to you name it). The geometric kernel powering these two is now the same, but it wasn't for years. I guess it's a good illustration of why this acquisition was successful and didn't ruin Solidworks: the company was left practically untouched for more than ten years. "assimilation" took place at a very slow pace (almost cosmological for a software company). Now the question to ask is more why the acquisition is taking place. To get a list of customers? To get skilled contributors, or knowledge, or patent, or a piece of technology? To get a presence in a different country? All or a part of this? To kill a competitor? Anyway you put it, acquisition is not a neutral move. It's always joining a bigger structure, hence jumping to a later stage and size at extreme speed. Considering how difficult it is for a single company to get through its different stages by itself, it is normal that acquisitions are hard for acquired companies. Assuming the objective is not to kill the acquired, tremendous efforts will be needed on both sides to make it work. The acquiring company ramping up newcomers, on new actual processes, on new ways of doing; the acquired one to agree to it, and accept that it is the cost to pay to operate at a higher scale.
  • JeremyHerrman 4y ago
    Did Solidworks actually move away from Parasolid? I had thought that only some 3DEXPERIENCE cloud products were using CGM, but Solidworks on the desktop was still based on Parasolid.
  • Czarcasm 4y ago
    Over the last 10 years Dassault has slowly been destroying Solidworks. Each update brings new bugs, and almost no new features. They are now trying to force all users over to their new 3DExperience platform which is a half-baked pile of garbage for all but large companies which can afford to have a dedicated IT team to support it. Dassault did kill Solidworks, it just took them some time.
  • heisenzombie 4y ago
    That's an unusual example. In my experience, Dassault are horrible to deal with. Their byzantine sales and aggressive legal departments have our company seriously looking to jump ship despite the large moving costs that would entail.
• hedora 4y ago
  AOL/Time Warner (Time Warner was the acquired company.)
• Ancalagon 4y ago
  Instagram, arguably
  • vosper 4y ago
    Agreed, and I also think Meta/Facebook's acquisition of Oculus was good for Oculus, too. Meta just reversed course on the requirement to have a Facebook account, which was the big thing people complained about. They're pouring enormous resources into VR with a long-term timeline. By some accounts it's less like Facebook took over Oculus, and more like Oculus took over Facebook. I hope Valve sticks it out with VR, because though I do not like or use Facebook I think Zuckerberg could be right about VR, and someone needs to compete with Meta. I think for Valve it's potentially an existential threat.
  • pcthrowaway 4y ago
    You know, I finally uninstalled instagram on my phone after yet another disappointment with the mobile app. It may not be entirely related to the acquisition, but they have been focusing much more on "stories" lately over pictures, and the text is an afterthought. The final straw for me was trying to highlight some text on a "video post" that explained what the heck I just saw, to expand it, or copy it to search for something, and I realized I just couldn't. Instead, every time I tapped on the text, the Instagram app was certain that that gesture meant I wanted to jump disconcertingly to the next photo/story. I tried to go back, and it would start playing the previous video with the elided text teasingly at the edge of the screen, and then when I would try to expand it, it would jump to the next one again. I'm sorry, but Instagram has completely gotten away from its roots, and the app has been corrupted by some pathetic attempt to drive engagement or whatever it is management thinks is important
• orthecreedence 4y ago
  I worked at Aol when Huffington Post acquired them for -$300M and the culture stayed mostly the same.
• e9 4y ago
  Firebase acquired by Google
  • kylehotchkiss 4y ago
    Innovations slowed significantly. I'm still waiting for a nice first party backup solution for firestore (I get a cloud firestore backup thing exists, but not especially elegant for newer devs). Their RTDB had a nice one: https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/backups https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/backups
• hestefisk 4y ago
  From the outside, IBM/RH merger looks like IBM tried to keep culture and organisation intact. Anyone from the inside who can comment?
  • tchock23 4y ago
    I’ve heard from a RH engineer that IBM has largely left them alone.
  • warrenm 4y ago
    From what I know of RH folks (across the spectrum) who stuck around through and after the acquisition ... so far IBM hasn't mucked it up too much The risk of someone walking out and starting Orange Sombrero Linux with 99% of RH's code (ie all the OSS stuff) seems to be keeping IBM in check (for now...)
    • hestefisk 4y ago
      Haha orange sombrero
• rsecora 4y ago
  2005: Yahoo! invested in Alibaba buying a 40% stake in the company for US$1 billion. 2014: US$10 billion in Alibaba's IPO alone to Yahoo. 2019: Altaba (yahoo remains owning Alibaba+YahooJapan) liquidates for US$40 billions.
• websap 4y ago
  Instagram. Facebook did a pretty good job maintaining the core product.
  • ryan_lane 4y ago
    Except that now Facebook has been messing with Instagram, and the feed is basically exactly the same as Facebook. More than half of my feed is content from accounts I haven't followed, and it's mostly the same short-video format that makes Facebook's feed awful to use.
    • tech234a 4y ago
      I think there is a button to “Snooze suggested posts in feed for 30 days”
• shakkhar 4y ago
  Whatsapp and IG
• nonameiguess 4y ago
  I'm probably answering too late to not get lost at this point in the sea of people answering regarding products not being ruined, but as far as actual company culture, E Systems survived quite well and intact after being acquired by Raytheon in the late 90s. One of my earlier jobs in Richardson, TX was at a facility that originally belonged to E Systems and I worked on one of the longstanding programs they'd had for decades. It very much stood out as being nothing at all like the rest of Raytheon. They had exemptions for nearly every corporate policy. People on any other program got moved around at will to meet the needs of the larger company, but anybody who had been with E Systems stayed exactly where they wanted to be doing what they wanted to do, even decades after the acquisition. They kept all of their original scheduling policies, continued using the same project management methods and tech stack without having to give in to corporate flavor of the month "Agile DevOps transformation" stuff that everyone else had to do. It's honestly probably still the best job in software I've ever had, and the actual system I worked on is still the most impressive I've been a part of, the exception to the rule of government shit projects, heavily classified but absolutely miles ahead of the closest commercial analog. If the pay wasn't so low, I'd gladly still be there. It's a dream job in every way except compensation.
• throw4837263 4y ago
  - Geely acquiring Volvo - ANTA acquiring Arcteryx
• FunnyBadger 4y ago
  When I was involved in M&A for a Fortune 20 company, the rate of failures for M&A we were told by various accounting firms and consultants was that 90% of all M&A never achieve the goals of doing it. So 10% success rate on a good day.