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Comment by inglor | Hacker News Reader

I think WhatsApp and Waze are both pretty good examples of high profile acquisitions that played out this way.

I also feel like (and I realize many disagree) that YouTube largely kept its "feel" and didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0.

Of course there are plenty of examples of exactly what you describe. I feel the same way about Java, Hudson (lol) and plenty of other acquisitions.

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Well I don't really use Trello, though I tried it for a while (wasn't my cup of tea). But the difference between WhatsApp and YouTube and Trello is that the latter is used by a different crowd than the former which is more conscious of and partial to their tools. Thus if Atlassian messed up Trello they'd certainly create lots of bias against the company as a whole in the Trello community, but that can't be said for WhatsApp or YouTube, where the majority of the users don't even care which company owns these services (I guess most wouldn't even know), let alone hating that company for changes to acquired products.

This is a minority sample of companies that survived post acquisition. There is a vast example of companies that doesn't.

I mean, it's a minority of companies that survive period.

I think Atlassian does a good job of not killing off apps it acquires (anyone have examples?). They just rebrand them and smoosh them into their whole suite of stuff they've bought.

Years ago I was talking to a Melbourne dev who said they've made very little (Jira and Confluence I think?) and the rest of it they've just bought and rebranded?

Yahoo likes to kill apps and take devs, like Astrid Tasks.

As much as you feel the same about Java and Hudson... what about Virtual Box. All of them are Oracle now and Virtual Box is pretty good?

All of them are Oracle now and Virtual Box is pretty good?

It really isn't. VirtualBox was always mediocre compared to VMWare, and ever since the Oracle acquisition, I haven't heard of any major new features or performance improvements coming out of the VirtualBox team. Though, given what Oracle has done to its other acquisitions, benign neglect is a pretty good outcome.

lol? VirtualBox has been maintaining its release cadence since the Oracle acquisition in 2010 (almost 7 years ago!), including 2 major-version releases. It seems to be one of the few parts of the Sun family that hasn't been mucked up yet. I keep waiting for Oracle to give it The Oracle Treatment(tm), but heretofore, that hasn't occurred. The VBox guys must have their cubicles hidden really well. ;)

If you want to see the "major new features" implemented, you need look no further than the changelog. [0]

And FWIW, I've tried VMWare Workstation several times and even own a copy of it, but VirtualBox has been and continues to be the most reliable, simple method of virtualization for me (and several of my colleagues). The VMWare drivers/tools are frequently broken by kernel upgrades, the interface is clunkier and more demanding (including requiring hosts to run a couple of background daemons; VBox operates fine on hosts with just the drivers installed), and the performance, while better in some areas, is much worse in others, making it a wash for general use.

[0] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

Virtualbox... good? I don't think so at all, it's networking and disk IO performance is horrendous, as much as I dislike VMware - Fusion is miles ahead of VirtualBox in all ways IMO except price. But now we have Xhyve & friends which is truly fantastic.

It just really depends on whether the scale/revenue of the acquired is immediately and clearly accretive to the acquirer. WhatsApp and Waze were pretty far along that path (and their prices reflected it!). Younger companies are more vulnerable.

Fair enough. Those are great examples.

Google tried to mess with Youtube but mainly gave up after it was a massive disaster.

And the legacy seems to be a comment system that's impossibly hard to follow. Reply button implies some kind of threads but I just see disjointed fragmented comments that just end up in more confusion, and more worthless comments. I wish they'd pull comments from besides videos.

Up vote and down vote. Suddenly the world would be a better place. Is there anyone anywhere that thinks the comments add anything?

That's a terrible example. Remember Google+ accounts and Youtube?

>didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0. //

Yeah, agreed, I was going to say the same.

YouTube was used as leverage to boost Google+. They backed off soon enough to save things (or perhaps YouTube is just too big to kill with such a mistake) but it was badly messed up IMO.

I still haven't gotten any assistance from Google after losing my YouTube account when my f#@!ing plus account (which I didn't even want) spawned another account from the gmail address I'd signed up before Google bought them.

Plus was the real turning point where I went from loving Google to tolerating them.

I also lost access to my first YouTube account. That was the first time my faith in the cloud had been shaken.

Windows Phone version of Waze got abandoned after Google's acquisition, so it isn't a good example.

Given that there were lots of companies that abandoned Window's phone, I'm not convinced it's related -- I suspect Waze would have abandoned it either way.

Honest question: if you ran a software company, would you devote any resources to a Windows phone version? If yes, then why?

You know, the entire installed app economy has turned into a big mess.

Would you devote your resources to an Android or iOS app if it isn't backed by a service which is useful in and of itself?

What about desktop Windows apps? Every time I see others interact with a Windows 10 app, I feel like throwing up. Mac apps seem to be doing slightly better, but that might be because it is an inherently tiny market.

Now that everything has moved to the web, people are trying to outdo each other with the creepiest possible tracking analytics. If you wish to develop useful, paid software which is mostly unobtrusive to the users, I would say you are already about 5 years too late.

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