In addition to institutionalization (yeah “asking Bob” is not a scalable solution) the other thing is risk skew changes. When you’re a startup in a garage with nothing to lose, who cares about compliance and adhering to laws and regulations (there is very little downside, and you’re a small target). When you’re worth a $1b now you’re a bigger target, and have value to protect…

Also, if you took VC money to start the company in the first place, then you may require fast growth in order to offer some prospect of a return to the people who invested with you. Similarly, if you maxed out your credit cards and took loans from family to get going, you need/want to grow fast to pay that back. Not every small company is in that situation, but many of them are.

Haha I joke, but seriously. I was cramming my way to the finish line of my startup idea when I realized I didn't need to. HN showed me that side-gigs can be as big or small as you want or need them to be, customers be willing.

"In the Plex" by Steven Levy goes into great detail on how YouTube could not survive its growth without the infrastructure and ad technologies Google brought to the platform.

I think it does, otherwise OP's question is ill-posed. That is, if YouTube scaled independently from a scrappy startup to a $170billion behemoth, the changes in corporate governance and culture would have been equally as drastic as being acquired by Google.

Bad actors creep in, which creates new rules, which negatively impacts the whole, which causes resentment, which causes more bad actors, which lead to more rules, and before you know it, review-girls don't seem so bad when your feed lands on terrorist-mickeymouse and the syringe babies.

We've done a number of acquisitions - and most seem to have done well. A big portion of that is recognizing that you are not only acquiring the company - it's IP and people - but also it's culture. If you don't want that culture - if it's not better then yours, you don't want it.

Seems like Pixar is doing well and Disney is taking influence from them

Where Disney is now is more about destroying the parks as cultural touchstones in the USA.

Pixar used to work on one movie at a time, and each one that came out was technologically ground breaking[1], a huge media event, and an instant classic beloved by adults and children.

Now days you have https://www.imdb.com/list/ls020738923/

Some of their movies are good, some are great, some aren't good, but now days they are willing to make cash grab sequels.

[1] Siggraph during Pixar release years turned into "what ground breaking tech did Pixar invent this time"

https://qz.com/1754288/disney-is-trying-to-revolutionize-fil...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bErPsq5kPzE

Though how much of that is Disney and how much is the companies they worked with is unknown to me.

Steve drove (Chief Operating Officer) Marco Landi and (chief technologist) Ellen Hancock out even before he became CEO. Bertrand Serlet (1997-2009) then Craig Federighi (2009-) ran the (variously named) OS team and Avie Tenivan was the tech lead, all former NeXT folks (which makes sense because Apple failed at 3 OS projects then shipped reskinned NeXTStep). Bud Tribble followed Steve to NeXT then back to Apple in various VP roles. George Crow and Jon Rubinstein did the same kind of loop working on hardware platforms at Apple-NeXT-Apple. Mitch Mandich became SVP of sales almost immediately after the acquisition. Etc.

The Objective-C Cocoa APIs are a straight descendant of the NeXTStep APIs, and many NeXT apps would run on OS X with a simple recompile. While there have been many additions since, and the main focus these days is on the Swift language, to the best of my knowledge, you can still take an Objective-C NeXT application and compile it on your ARMintosh and have it run with very few issues.

I was a Mac user from 1989, and I didn't like OS X much at the time. It felt like a completely new system, not an update to what I was used to. Sure, it was better in many technical ways, but it was also a lot more complicated. And it felt different. So there were was definitely a sense that it was really a Mac anymore.

Just about the only technical concession to the old Mac crowd that I can think of was the use of the old HFS+ file system, over NeXT's UNIX filesystem. And I think this was only because there was a transition period of several years where dual-booting was common, even necessary. So you could install OS X next to your old OS 9 system and boot either at your discretion without having to have several partitions. Mac OS9 is very dependent on some features in its FS, so this was the only way to allow a smooth transition. But other than that, OS X was and felt like a new, alien system, even though it did allow for compatibility with many applications.

Also, early versions of OS X (IIRC though 10.4) were perfectly happy to install and work on UFS, the installer would even help you do so.

From the user end, the problem with running OSX on UFS was that... a bunch of sloppy software broke on case-sensitive volumes. Famously, Adobe's entire suite wouldn't even install on case-sensitive volumes (see https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-case-sensiti... I think it's still unfixed to this day). This is probably also the reason why despite Apple finally getting a modern file system... APFS has and defaults to a case-insensitive mode in opposition to essentially every other modern FS.

Fun times!

Most users don't know that Solidworks, which is well know as a mid level solution for CAD, is actually owned by the French company developing CATIA, which is practically used by every single serious manufacturer in the world (from automotive to aircraft to ship to factory to you name it).

The geometric kernel powering these two is now the same, but it wasn't for years. I guess it's a good illustration of why this acquisition was successful and didn't ruin Solidworks: the company was left practically untouched for more than ten years. "assimilation" took place at a very slow pace (almost cosmological for a software company).

Now the question to ask is more why the acquisition is taking place. To get a list of customers? To get skilled contributors, or knowledge, or patent, or a piece of technology? To get a presence in a different country? All or a part of this? To kill a competitor?

Anyway you put it, acquisition is not a neutral move. It's always joining a bigger structure, hence jumping to a later stage and size at extreme speed. Considering how difficult it is for a single company to get through its different stages by itself, it is normal that acquisitions are hard for acquired companies. Assuming the objective is not to kill the acquired, tremendous efforts will be needed on both sides to make it work. The acquiring company ramping up newcomers, on new actual processes, on new ways of doing; the acquired one to agree to it, and accept that it is the cost to pay to operate at a higher scale.

They are now trying to force all users over to their new 3DExperience platform which is a half-baked pile of garbage for all but large companies which can afford to have a dedicated IT team to support it.

Dassault did kill Solidworks, it just took them some time.

I was there from 2010-2017. The philosophy of the holdings was to let its constituent companies execute independently and even compete (this included Priceline.com, Agoda, Kayak, rentalcars.com, OpenTable, etc). Therefore the culture of booking.com remained fairly intact for a very long time.

Booking.com is still good though. I always use it for my first search for accommodation, then reserve using booking.com, or direct with a hotel depending on which one has the best cancellation/change policy. That is still so important due to COVID and frequent flight cancellations.

By 2010, was Booking.com seen as the essential core of Priceline? Were the people leading the overall company and/or Booking decisions, Priceline people or Booking.com people?

That being said, I think it was not a mistake for the previous owner(s) to sell at the time. Priceline had cash, and the marketing heavy ("buy ads in January, stay in summer, bill hotel at the end of the month after the stay") business had significant cash flow challenges in terms of growth.

When I joined in late 2010, Booking still seemed to be viewed as a bit of a poorly understood miracle by the group folks, growing nearly 2x every year. Certainly the engineering department was so much less... corporate... than the mothership's that we were sometimes referred to as the cowboys in Amsterdam.

Shortly thereafter, they hired Darren Huston to run Booking, who relatively soon after that (like 24 months? I'm sure Google search will find that answer) also became the group CEO, all based in Amsterdam. At the latest then, Booking would have been officially the core of the company, even though it had been the growth motor for well longer.

Historically, the benefits offered by Priceline group to booking were IMO chiefly aforementioned cash flow for growth, and shared technical infrastructure (WAN, shared colo space). Booking had outgrown the group infrastructure team's ability to scale. The perpetual culture clash eventually led to the central infrastructure group being broken up (very much an outcome driven by the booking CTO, Brendan Bank). So we built our own network and DC team since we had far, far outgrown the infrastructure needs of other group companies.

For a long time, Booking was so focused on only doing things that were strictly measurable and attributable that we didn't do any brand advertising or classical marketing (cf. quantitative fallacy). We co-grew with Google search ads in particular and had built very significant tooling around AdWords since the Google provided infrastructure didn't scale. Unofficially, we were the largest ads customer for a long time spending billions annually at useful ROI. This "stealth mode" meant that we weren't getting a lot of DDoS type threats to deal with for example and likely less fraud risk. It also meant that we always chuckled in earnings calls when analysts praised the "Priceline business being very successful overseas". Eventually reality caught up and PCLN became BKNG - Booking Holdings.

'twas a wild ride. Not always fun but chock full of learning.

AMA if you like.

It's a genuine question, I'm not being sarcastic, I really don't understand the statement (which seems to be shared by several people here). I honestly can't point out a single thing that was delivered that changed the game for like, 6 years from now if not more (copilot is a nice gadget IMHO but it's not really game changer, is it?).

I was actually hoping that MS support would change that, but I don't see it happening.

Maybe these changes are incremental, maybe you don’t cherish them as much as I do ,and some were very much over due. Regardless, I like them and am impressed by Github’s recent work.

Maybe Github Actions has brought in a lot more revenue, too. They get a "discount" on Azure hosting, I'm sure.

However, all jests aside, being a relatively open source person, I haven't seen much in the git product of Github getting any worse after Microsoft acquired them. The social aspect, well, it is what it is, and I don't care for it, but I don't necessarily think my preferences translate well to a quarterly earnings call.

I do personally perceive the downtime to be more frequent now, but maybe only because it's more publicized, I do not have any data to substantiate that personal observation.

However their reliability is down the toilet. So a mixed bag, IMHO.

Reliability went way down after the acquisition.

It feels like we constantly have issues with github, it's becoming as bad as azure.

Actions, Packages and Projects (beta) are nice product ideas but they are a nightmare of DX experience.

You can see they rushed them out to compete with Gitlab.

Also dodgy stuff like Copilot.

It is worth noting that, most of the time, the things that are so wonderful about working at the small company are fun for all the same reasons that they aren't sustainable. Most startups are not cash positive - they don't make money, they just lose money more slowly than they get investment (by selling off bits of the company). So very often, the stuff you want to have continue just can't because it was based on imaginary income. The exit plan always involves the company becoming profitable at some point (maybe after multiple rounds of acquisitions) and that usually means that on each round the company has to become more realistic about how they spend their money, including how they manage their devs.

On the other hand, it's true that a small lifestyle company can keep many of those things, but they do that by not having a plan to sell, which tends to mean you get the spirit and independence but not the throwing-around-cash-like-it-was-free fun times.

When you factor in opportunity-cost, the whole office plays lazer tag on friday is really bloody expensive.

This is a very special case though! Tableau is a company with a lot of Fortune 500 buy-in, but an aging development stack and business model. So this is the case of a somewhat more dynamic larger company acquiring a set of customers and some fundamental tech.

Usually acquisitions are from big/slow/established/monopoly acquiring an upstart and it’s no surprise that usually ends up badly.

Now, these could all have very well been in development before the acquisition, but as a whole, the capabilities have grown tremendously since that time.

Also, it seems like the licensing options for smaller businesses has really been focused on since the acquisition. It's become much more affordable for a small business to get and use Tableau compared to 4-5 years ago.

https://www.acquired.fm/

It's an amazing show

There are cases where the acquired company is left to run more-or-less independently, and its stock is just owned (or majority-owned) by the acquirer. But that's probably the exception rather than the rule. Usually, if you get acquired, you're now an employee of Big Co.

The first time I was in a company that got acquired, this happened. Then it got acquired again by an even bigger fish and it didn't really happen because it already sucked after the first time.

The second company that got acquired it also happened. Usually the suck starts after a year when managers try to increase their bonuses by finding "synergies," which really means cutting employees through consolidation and adding a bunch of unnecessary friction to the development process.

The lesson I've learned is if you get acquired, you've got about a year to get out or you will be miserable if you aren't the big-co type. I made the mistake of staying too long both times it's happened to me.

To answer your question, I've never been at a company that got acquired and it was better for me.

Culture: there's different people around, now. So culture necessarily changes.

Flexibility: bigger companies are less flexible because there are simply more people. Even if every individual is more flexible, it doesn't matter.

Enthusiasm, spirit, and happiness - are these not synonyms, in this context? And if they are, are they not reactions to external factors (culture & flexibility)?

I would suggest your question may be tautological: big companies will always ruin small companies from the perspective of someone who likes small companies because the small company became big.

It's honestly probably still the best job in software I've ever had, and the actual system I worked on is still the most impressive I've been a part of, the exception to the rule of government shit projects, heavily classified but absolutely miles ahead of the closest commercial analog. If the pay wasn't so low, I'd gladly still be there. It's a dream job in every way except compensation.

I know there is a lot of Oracle hate but: MySQL, GraalVM (Java), Sun hardware (both Exa* and SPARC), VirtualBox and many more technologies are better today than prior.

The challenge Sun would have had, regardless of Oracle or not, is that they were solidly in the On-Prem business ... and the market has moved to Cloud.

Nothing destroyed. Just differences in company culture.

The alternative for Sun was IBM to buy them. An acquisition by IBM would have been the death of Sun. Sun, under Oracle, still lives on well today.

Which is what this thread is largely about.

Because a # of the examples given are parent companies just leaving the acquired company alone in isolation.

How is that good for either the acquirer or the consumers.

No synergies can be had if the two companies are operating independently.

Usually when a company is acquired, certain unique (and attractive) features of its company culture die pretty fast.

These can be measurable things eg: PTO policies, imposing certain dev environments/corp machine policies on devs, bonus structures, conference/training allowances, frequency and structure of meetings, etc.

Or these can be more vague things, like shifts in how internal comms work, the death of informal means of resolving issues, incremental shifts in management style, etc.

The last acquisition I went through (as an employee of the acquired company) resulted in about half of my team leaving pretty quick. The acquirer basically took away all the perks that made working there worthwhile (compared to any given competitor).

If my current employer was to be acquired, I'm willing to bet that the entire staff of the business unit I'm part of will be looking for new jobs, as I doubt the acquirer would be giving us the degree of freedom that we have currently.

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Technology/story?id=7395780&page=...

It took a few years to find its footing, but Oracle has really given Java the space and resources to thrive. The roadmap is fuller than it ever has been and the release cadence continues to deliver value. Check out projects Amber, Loom, Panama, Valhalla. Tap into the stream of Inside.java. Exciting times.

Point being, I believe Java is a datapoint for successful product acquisition.

A lot of telecoms stuff.

> Who's using Virtualbox over HyperV, Libvirt or VMWare?

A considerable number of people who want an open source virtualization solution that is relatively painless to use (so, not libvirt).

The risk of someone walking out and starting Orange Sombrero Linux with 99% of RH's code (ie all the OSS stuff) seems to be keeping IBM in check (for now...)

The whole episode is brilliant, full of great insights that I think about often. It's well worth a listen.

[1] https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/34646260/collison-grow...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_Software

Also Slack and Salesforce's culture is very different. Salesforce is closer to Oracle, Slack always had super-technical, friendly sales and support staff.

I'm sure we'll see price hikes and a push to land larger, government and Enterprise contracts as they forget about SME.

- AbeBooks (acquired by Amazon in 2008)

- Book Depository (acquired by Amazon in 2011)

These companies don't appeared to have changed dramatically from when Amazon bought them. I wonder if these companies operate 'independently' without too much undue influence from Amazon?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobipocket

2014: US$10 billion in Alibaba's IPO alone to Yahoo.

2019: Altaba (yahoo remains owning Alibaba+YahooJapan) liquidates for US$40 billions.

This company does decent M&A in the auto ancilliaries industry

Github and Linkedin both have their own culture, perks, and the companies are run independently. Infact, Linkedin pays better than Microsoft and are overall happier.

(Time Warner was the acquired company.)

It may not be entirely related to the acquisition, but they have been focusing much more on "stories" lately over pictures, and the text is an afterthought.

The final straw for me was trying to highlight some text on a "video post" that explained what the heck I just saw, to expand it, or copy it to search for something, and I realized I just couldn't. Instead, every time I tapped on the text, the Instagram app was certain that that gesture meant I wanted to jump disconcertingly to the next photo/story. I tried to go back, and it would start playing the previous video with the elided text teasingly at the edge of the screen, and then when I would try to expand it, it would jump to the next one again.

I'm sorry, but Instagram has completely gotten away from its roots, and the app has been corrupted by some pathetic attempt to drive engagement or whatever it is management thinks is important

I hope Valve sticks it out with VR, because though I do not like or use Facebook I think Zuckerberg could be right about VR, and someone needs to compete with Meta. I think for Valve it's potentially an existential threat.

Instagram specifically has just become another ad infested shopping app for me these days.

Nobody cares about this, the money they make isn't what other people interact with. It's the things they create.

Counter-counterpoints:

Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Cars 3, Coco, Onward, Luca, Turning Red, Lightyear.

The (not very original) point is: You can no longer count on a Pixar movie being excellent.

As long as we're doing Disney acquisitions, Lucasfilm is also still pretty independent and successful. Other Disney acquisitions have been less so.

LucasArts (now known as Lucasfilm Games)... tell that to the games that were put on hold and then eventually cancelled upon acquisition.

But yeah you have a good point. They retained their culture and in fact spread it further by having the Pixar folks take over Disney Animation.

- ANTA acquiring Arcteryx