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Yes: the running joke is/was that McD bought Boeing with Boeing's money. * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/60218
by throw0101d 3y ago
Yes: the running joke is/was that McD bought Boeing with Boeing's money.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
* https://archive.is/q5pQV https://archive.is/q5pQV
* https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...
* https://simpleflying.com/mcdonnel-douglas-boeing-merger/ https://simpleflying.com/mcdonnel-douglas-boeing-merger/
B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. What would have been a better idea would have been, instead of doing an 'total' acquisition, is to wait for McD to go bankrupt, and then buy the parts that didn't suck.
When they did the acquisition, they also got the management folks… who ran McD into the ground in the first place.
- jes5199 3y agoI’ve heard variations on this story a few times, successful company swallows failing company and gets infected by failing-culture. Isn’t that what happened to Netscape?
- bsimpson 3y agoWho poisoned Netscape?
- wvenable 3y agoAOL
- bsimpson 3y agoDidn't AOL buy Netscape? There's a long list of companies that died by being acquired into a bad culture. OP is talking about the opposite: an acquisition so toxic it rots the parent company.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoAOL was borgified by Time Warner management post acquisition the same way Boeing was by MD.
- squiffsquiff 3y agoYou make it sound like AOL was cool before the Time-Warner merger and people didn't joke about e.g. the free trial CD's
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThey were a successful online service before the internet. Yes. They were just as cool as Compuserve and Prodigy.
- lmm 3y agoBy the time of the merger with Time Warner they were a joke among technical people. They were in the same category as Compuserve and Prodigy, but marketed specifically as an "easy" service for less technical users.
- panick21_ 3y agoNetscape died because browser became a utility in the OS.
- purerandomness 3y agoIt's not that simple. Netscape died because Microsoft bundled their browser with the operating system and made it free for commercial use, what essentially led to the huge antitrust case. Only after that did browsers become utilities in the OS, with open source engines like Konqueror's KHTML (which later became WebKit, which later became Blink) and Netscape/Mozilla's Gecko
- panick21_ 3y ago
- classichasclass 3y agoCollabra, per jwz. See "groupware bad" (not direct linking in case he still has the referer block up).
- thinkerswell 3y agoIs Collabora not a good product?
- classichasclass 3y agoNot Collabora. Collabra was a groupware company Netscape acquired to shore up the E-mail portion of Communicator. It didn't work and ended up substantially delaying future development of the browser suite.
- jes5199 3y agothanks, I couldn’t remember where I had heard it
- acdha 3y agoGoogle bought DoubleClick in 2008. Pretty much everything they started after that point has failed because the focus has been on selling ads rather than building something normal people enjoy using.
- rtkwe 3y agoOn the other hand how much of the things Google has built/bought and grew today we enjoy could exist without the firehose of money that ads represented? I'm not sure Youtube happens without the ad money.
- owisd 3y agoGoogle had enough 3rd party ad revenue before they bought DoubleClick (2008) to buy YouTube (2006).
- rtkwe 3y agoI'm mostly wondering if they could have kept it as open as they do to non revenue generating users or would they have had to do something like Vimeo where after a certain number of views they come asking for money or would have had to limit the quality/quantity of uploads from small creators due to the costs of storing and serving their videos with limited ad returns.
- nostrademons 3y agoAdWords was doing just fine before DoubleClick. That's how they got the money to buy DoubleClick in the first place. The problem was specifically DoubleClick management, who then got inserted in high levels within the Ads organization, forcing out the very technically & economically savvy people who were there before. This is a recurring problem in large organizations. People who spend their time learning to be politically savvy will be...politically savvy, and be at an advantage when playing power politics that determines who is in charge. The effort needed to become politically savvy usually comes at the expense of domain/technical/economic knowledge required to actually get the job done. Eventually the organization becomes very good at playing political games and very bad at getting stuff done, until it collapses.
- KptMarchewa 3y agoYou don't have to keep the management from the company you've bought.
- rtkwe 3y agoIn a broad sense high level management tends to take care of it's own in a bit of self interest so when they screw up and run a company into the ground chasing short term quarterly profits they'll also get taken care of.
- cinntaile 3y agoWell clearly the McD people were more skilled politicians.
- pstuart 3y agoThis can't be emphasized enough. Businesses (and most organizations) are not meritocracies.
- jaybrendansmith 3y agoThis is exactly it. The skilled politicians are the reason why the company failed in the first place. They then take over the acquiring company from within like a virus and destroy that next. Rule of thumb: If a company is failing and you purchase it, fire everybody. Either the culture or the people are poison, and they will infect you.
- jcadam 3y ago> fire everybody At the very least, anyone in a management position.
- jaybrendansmith 3y agoYes absolutely - keep the skilled folks below the VP level and perhaps some of the Directors. Generally garbage flows from the top down, and they've been putting up with it this entire time.
- akira2501 3y ago> B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. Creating monopolies and reducing suppliers actually harms "national security." Our braindead managerial class in action.
- AdrianB1 3y agoThat is correct. However MDD was manufacturing key military products (F-15, F-18) and it was doing bad financially, going bankrupt and jeopardizing the fighter plane production and maintenance was a "national security" problem that forced the Boeing acquisition of MDD.
- akira2501 3y agoWeird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go bankrupt." Perhaps they should have just been auctioned off and other investors given an opportunity to create new lines of business out of the incompetent mess they had become. Taking the mess and wholesale buying it into another company and then keeping the management that created the problem in the first place is astronomically dumb.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Weird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go bankrupt." We massively drew down defence spending at the end of the Cold War.
- jethro_tell 3y agoAlso, all the money in the world doesn't mean you spend it on things that make money later. If you spend your manufacturing budget on strippers, you won't have anything to sell later.
- tcmart14 3y agowoah woah now, someone has to put those young ladies through college and the manufacturing budget has to be spent.
- whycome 3y ago> B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. Are we seeing similar things right now? Will companies like OpenAI or Nvidia be forced to merge or buy other players in the space? Nvidia already has to work around export restrictions. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/17/23921131/us-china-restrictions-ai-chip-sales-nvidia https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/17/23921131/us-china-restri...