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I bet one could make a successful business by just noticing aqcuisitions as they happen and immediately starting work to clone the acquired product exactly. Th

I bet one could make a successful business by just noticing aqcuisitions as they happen and immediately starting work to clone the acquired product exactly. This pattern of shutting down the acquired service and leaving all their users hanging is so common that it seems like it should be easy to capitalize on. In this case, you would have had two years to see this coming (and if you check out the comment thread from when the acquisition happened, you'll notice that everybody did see it coming) and do the rather straightforward development work to get a new version up and running. Then all you'd need do is drop a link in this thread right here today to your feature-wise Rapportive clone that actually still works as advertised, and you'd have 326,000 new customers tomorrow.

asuffield 12y ago
You could do much the same thing looking at startups which are 2 years old. The post-acquisition survival rate of a product is not that much better than the pre-acquisition survival rate - getting bought by a larger company does not mean that they won't eventually decide the same thing you would have found on your own: the product does not bring in enough money to pay for itself. Acquisitions are a risky investment. You buy a company and it might turn out to be worthless.