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My mother was a banker. She asked a hypothetical question of me, 30 years ago, that I've never been able to answer: "Name for me one company that was better, fo
by jackhack 3y ago
My mother was a banker. She asked a hypothetical question of me, 30 years ago, that I've never been able to answer: "Name for me one company that was better, for the customer or the employees, after a merger."
- aaronbrethorst 3y agoApple/NeXT
- mistrial9 3y agoNeXT acquired Apple
- aaronbrethorst 3y agoI argued the same on here 12 years (and three days) ago, and got some hilariously snippy responses. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2732235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2732235
- Gare 3y agoAirbus?
- isykt 3y agoThis was an acquisition, not a merger, but if we misquote your mother a bit to fit this situation: YouTube?
- Forgeties79 3y agoYouTube’s algorithm routinely drives people to more and more extreme content and is designed to be as addictive as possible so that users don’t leave. A lot of this is the result of Google’s acquiring them. I’m curious how you think it’s better. Let me also be clear that it’s not like it was squeaky clean and friendly prior. But to say it has improved since the acquisition…I’m having a hard time seeing that.
- HWR_14 3y agoThe acquisition by Google happened 18 months into YouTubes existence. It's been 18 years since then. I don't know if you really recall what a site was like 18 years ago. Besides that, what Google provided was hosting infrastructure and legal protection. Otherwise they would have been sued into nothing and couldn't have afforded to serve video.
- ghaff 3y agoEarly on YouTube was basically a repository of commercial copyrighted material. Widespread home video was not really a big thing at the time.
- Forgeties79 3y agoHonestly I did not realize that acquisition happened so early in YT’s existence. That’s on me I suppose.
- HWR_14 3y agoIt's understandable. It was originally allowed to be its own thing. There were several iterations of it being brought into the Google fold, and it would be easy to mistake any of those for the acquisition event.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alkibiades 3y agoyoutube is significantly worse other than maybe in stability/uptime. remember google tried to force that weird google plus login instead? and now it’s so corporatized/ad filled
- gruez 3y agoWhen you consider the alternative is no youtube at all (remember, they were hemorrhaging money), everything you described doesn't seem so bad.
- mochomocha 3y agoIn no world would Youtube be even remotely profitable without advertising. Google ran it as a $B+/year loss for years before managing to making it profitable. Tell me now a believable alternative growth story for Youtube where Google didn't buy it and the service isn't "corporatized" and not losing money. You can't compare an unprofitable small-scale startup product to what the same product needs to be to make it 1) planet-scale and 2) profitable.
- tempestn 3y agoYeah, without an acquisition, YouTube doesn't exist today. And most acquisitions would have turned out far worse than the Google one did. (See Evernote...)
- 29athrowaway 3y agoIt's full of residential trash burning videos. They film themselves burning residential trash and teach others "how to save money at the dump" doing it. Each one of them pollutes more than an entire city. I've reported them, because those activities are illegal, and YouTube keeps the videos up.
- tempestn 3y agoSounds like the algorithm has learned that you get really fired up about residential trash videos.
- isykt 3y agoThe comment I'm responding to asked if either the customer or the company were better after the merger. Google's (and YouTube's) customers are advertisers. Advertisers are certainly better off with the scale and reach that Google juiced YouTube with, and Google earns about $15B annually in revenue from it. So, I'd say both conditions are met.
- gruez 3y agoWashington Mutual
- constantly 3y agoMadrigal Electromotive GmbH.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoMercedes/Benz?
- RamblingCTO 3y agoWhy do you think this was a merger or an acquisition?
- KingOfCoders 3y ago"Why do you think this was a merger or an acquisition?" The reason I think it was a merger is, that it was a merger. "The first Mercedes-Benz branded vehicles were produced in 1926, following the merger of Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler's companies into the Daimler-Benz company on 28 June of the same year." Mercedes was a car name from the Daimlers side of the merger (from a car seller and racing team) - so it was Mercedes-Benz.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoWhy the downvote?
- HWR_14 3y agoDidn't the Sprint/TMobile merger provide a real competition to the AT&T/Verizon duopoly?
- shakow 3y agoLamborghini?
- beau_g 3y agoSurely this supports the poster's statement - they went from the Miura and Countach to todays RGB gamer mouse mobile with a Volkswagen drivetrain - a true Shakespearean tragedy
- comfypotato 3y agoI like the mainstream Lamborghinis today better than Countach. They’re just with the times and you like a classic Lamborghini.
- symlinkk 3y agoAustria-Hungary
- n3m4c 3y agoThat wasn’t really a merger, more like a renaming
- Rebelgecko 3y agoMartin-Marrieta?
- iancmceachern 3y agoI've been through several and in my case it's 0 for 4
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]