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Comment by andrei821 | Hacker News Reader

For me it looks like IBM and VMWare are reinventing themselves trough these aquisitions. If you work with enterprise customers, you can see how much they hate these kind of vendors, and how eager they are to understand open-source solutions,and to adopt the fast pace of internet companies. IBM and VMWare understood this too, and now they are adapting to this new landscape. I am confident that when IBM will say to my customers: hey, we can deploy and support Kubernetes for you (with the same agilty as your existing small vendors) they will go for it, just to get rid of the bureaucratic burden generated by their purchasing departments, and us, the small vendors will have to reinvent as well, and this is how innovation happens.

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Is that any different than

Microsoft - PowerPoint, Hotmail, FrontPage, Windows Live Messenger, Visio, Bungie, Rare, Lionhead, Mojang, Dynamics (Great Plains, NAV), Skype, Defender, Perceptive Pixel (Surface Hubs), Yammer, LinkedIn, Acompli (Outlook Mobile), GitHub, Xamarin, Beam (Mixer)

Facebook - Beluga (Messenger app), Snaptu (Facebook for Every Phone, Facebook Lite), Instagram, Atlas, Parse, WhatsApp, Occulus, LiveRail (video monitization)

Adobe - PageMaker, After Effects, Photoshop, FrameMaker, GoLive, Audition, Echosign (Adobe Sign), Macromedia (who itself acquired Freehand, Dreamweaver, Flash, ColdFusion), Fireworks, plus its entire Marketing Cloud: Omniture, Day, Auditude, Neolane, Livefyre, TubeMogul, Magento, Marketo etc

Oracle - ...

the list goes on and on. A lot of these products would not be where they are today (nor shuttered necessarily) without the resources (or lackthereof) poured into them after acquisition. Yahoo tried and failed miserably in its end.

Facebook may be the best example on that list. They get beat to mobile messenging, they buy Beluga. They lose screen time to mobile devices, they buy Snaptu. They get beat again to mobile (camera/photo album), they buy Instagram. The get beat by in messenging AGAIN, and they buy WhatsApp. They get beat to video by youtube, they buy LiveRail. In a panic to not be beat again they buy Occulus.

Plus, in this case they are mostly buying the Reputation and Service Contracts, not as much the product. IBM is already mostly a Service, not product, company now.

Great comment. Thanks for sharing all of this knowledge.

> They loose screen time to mobile devices, they buy Snaptu.

This was acquisition for feature phones and not touch phones. Your comment implies that Facebook mobile app came out of this acquisition - which is not true.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/facebook-reportedly-acquir...

Good call, yes its not THE facebook app, just A facebook app. I fixed my comment.

Google is a great example too. Many of Google’s best-known hits began outside of Google:

* Maps (maps from Where2 Technologies, acquired in 2004; real-time traffic from ZipDash, acquired in 2004; satellite imagery from Keyhole, acquired in 2005)

* Android (founded in 2003, bought for $50M+ in 2005)

* YouTube (founded in 2005, bought for $1.7B in 2006)

* Adsense (Google acquired Applied Semantics in 2003, DoubleClick in 2007, and AdMob for mobile ads in 2009)

* Google Docs (spreadsheets by 2Web, acquired in 2005; docs by Upstartle, acquired in 2006; slides by Tonic Systems, acquired in 2007)

* Waymo (Thrun's team, 510 Systems)

A long list of Alphabet's acquisitions are on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Even IBM Cloud is largely built from SoftLayer, Cloudant, Compose, Cleversafe etc, RedHat fits perflectly with IBMs strategy since 2014.

Interestingly enough, IBM has even left https://www.compose.com/ as a standalone entity for now.

Great list, it puts the trees in context of the forest.

While I'd love to believe both IBM and VMWare are acquiring in the spirit of Open Source and innovation both are, sadly, chasing sales organizations who are looking at long term pipeline dry up in their legacy product models. Time will tell, especially for IBM, but the people running these organizations are truly not friendly to, or even remotely, understand OSS at the core. Nor do they care.

Acquisitions today are mainly to block competition early. While I'm painting a broad stroke most of these types of acquisitions do little to nothing for the greater long term good of the original products. What has IBM contributed to OSS in the last decade that's been of significant value? Then compare that to the money they make off repackaging these tools and "supporting" them. IBM is chasing dollars and relevance. VMW is trying to compete in a market they've not been able to wedge into helping them sell more seats for VSphere.

Both of these companies have, historically, abused OSS. It's disheartening to see that these monoliths have figured out to buy early and often. And through that playbook, ultimately, maintain control.

Reinventing themselves, based on Oracle the price gouging licencing company's model.

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