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Isn't this how competition works? Big payoffs create massive incentives for people to create great products in the hope they will be bought out. Adobe may hav
by tus666 4y ago
Isn't this how competition works?
Big payoffs create massive incentives for people to create great products in the hope they will be bought out.
Adobe may have "destroyed" one great product, but think of the hundreds of new ones they have incentivized to be created.
People look at this all wrong and ignore the downstream effect.
- epolanski 4y agoI count more software that has been ruined and/or killed by acquisitions than the one bred by those.
- jaxrtech 4y agoWould agree in large part. I think the ones that were successful, they're successful enough that you forget it was an acquisition. One off the top my head is Google Docs[1] which, for the longest time, I was pretty sure it was in-house tech. It's actually a number of acquisitions for the collaborative editor tech and then MS Office support. It seems now that most incumbents have enough cash to not care about being that strategic about acquisitions. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs#History
- epolanski 4y agoI have not implied that all acquisitions are bad, but acquisitions to kill do not necessarily breed more better competition.
- boltzmann-brain 4y agoThis acquisition sounds like the start of a twitch streamer joke. "Have you heard about Figma?"
- nindalf 4y agoHow about Android? The original team joined Google and pivoted their product once the iPhone was demoed.
- KptMarchewa 4y agoGoogle Maps, Google Earth, Youtube, Android - all acquisitions.
- flir 4y agoIt's the outsourcing of R&D. Behemoths used to have huge R&D budgets, now they let the market decide and harvest the successful solutions. It's a market efficiency, I guess, otherwise they'd stick with the R&D approach.
- kjellsbells 4y agoThe "used to" is a long long time ago. Before FAANG there was, for example Intel, Microsoft and Cisco, and they were very happy to vacuum up companies instead of holding a big r&d bag. Cisco got to be very good at it, in particular. And of course this is very much standard practice in pharma drug discovery. I think the Golden Age of internal R&D was probably 1960-1980 at Bell Labs, IBM and the really large engineering cos like Boeing?
- flir 4y agoBell is what I was thinking of, too.
- thewileyone 4y agoReally depends on the management of the acquiring company. Adobe acquired Aldus and didn't help the Aldus market.
- DoctorOW 4y agoI think people thought because software cannot really be scarce that it was immune to the flaws of capitalism but that doesn't seem to be the case.
- sure_about_that 4y agoDoes this include the people who got paid out and went on to build new software companies?
- rmbyrro 4y agoWeren't most of these ruined software bred by the prospects of acquisition in the first place?
- BurningFrog 4y agoThis sounds like a very complicated study to design.
- cowuser666 4y agoIt seems like the model here is just a series of temporary alternatives (if we're lucky, creating value isn't easy). But people need software to be long-term viable to invest in learning and locking into the ecosystem. Seems good for the founders though.