https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23690967 discussion of the acquisition itself.

Given how much was raised by the company itself (~$200M according to https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/north-8daa) the acquisition seems like Google providing an exit opportunity for the company and its investors, arguably much better for the ecosystem than what Amazon does

It’s a terrible article, but I wasn’t aware that they were bought. This is very expensive R&D, and being bought out by the FAANG is one of the very few positive outcomes for a hardware startup. Hopefully they did it for the money.

iirc North did not make any money off the aquisition, as they were failing and Google bought them out for roughly the amount of capital previously invested.

"Worse" doesn't just mean "worse for the companies involved", it can also mean "worse for society". The net result of Google continually buying startups and shutting down the projects is that fewer products receive long-term support, receive any iterative improvements, or can be relied upon to exist later.

It's still too early to say and we don't have enough visibility. Pairing North's tech with Google's distribution would expand the reach and potential of this type of product. North could've been running out of money before the acquisition so Google swooping in ensured the tech lived on. These are all plausible outcomes that would end up being "better for society"

And they paid a lot of money to do that (as much as it was worth, at least), which was parent company's point. Whereas Amazon did not- they made only a partial investment in order the kill the entire thing. That full Google money (fairly, it could be argued) compensates the destruction you describe and allows the recipient of the money to do something else productive.

How so? The company was already dying on its own, Google only vultured and bailed them out from bankruptcy. The product was a "mutant" trying new things that wasn't viable in the end.

That seems to be the problem with increasingly bigger and dominant companies. They kill or buy new competitors before they can get traction. In the end society as a whole loses big time because a lot of innovation gets lost. I really hope there will be a trend where companies beyond a certain size get viewed as a negative and discouraged.

Buying up and killing competitors seems worse for consumers than merely competing unfairly.