Ask HN: What company got better after an acquisition, and how/why? Are there any good examples of companies that got acquired, and that company did even better after the acquisition? If you worked there, what did the parent company do/not do to make your company even stronger? |
It's amazing that in a decade or two we went from paper atlas books and yellow pages to bring able to look up the top restaurants an hour from where you are, and a gas station along the way, in a country you've never been to before, with real time traffic and directions spoken to you in your language. The amount of integration work it took to get there was incredible and you could see it slowly improve with each new acquisition (Keyhole for satellite images, Waze for crowdsourced reports, etc.) It must've been such an exciting time to work on that Maps.
The journey from Writely into the integrated GSuite (or whatever it's called these days) is pretty amazing too, creating an awesome alternative to MS Office.
That was all decades ago though. Who knows what Google is up to these days...
I think Github and Linkedin (both acquired by MS) are both more popular now but I presume they would have continued to grow in popularity anyway, so I don't know if it had anything to do with the takeover.
Instagram is another one that has done well, but again it might have done well anyway.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1996%E2%80%932006:_Acquis...
Nvidia bought 3DFX and cornered the gaming GPU market for a while, then did some dual-GPU linking stuff for a while, then started selling to crypto and ML later on.
Adobe bought Macromedia, killed Flash, focused on Creative Cloud subs, and made a bunch of money while adding a bunch of features (and adding a lot of bloat). They just bought Figma too, will have to see how that turns out.
Tencent bought up a bunch of major and minor Western game dev studios (like Epic/Fortnite, Path of Exile, League of Legends, Funcom, Digital Extremes), injected a ton of funding, but largely let them keep operating as before. Instead of gatcha-fying everything with microtransactions, they spun off separate Asian versions with more grind and more MTX but kept the Western games largely as-is, acting as an invisible puppeteer behind the scenes (but giving the studios a ton of funding). There are similar Chinese takeovers of major Hollywood studios and movie chains.