Hacker News Reader

Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

> My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead. You become a cemerery of dreams and ideas. You become an IBM,HP,Xerox and AT&T. Once the damage is done it becomes nearl impossible to recover from.

Would Apple be a counter-example? Multitouch, PA Semi, Siri, TouchID, etc etc lots of Apple technology was acquired but nobody laments the death of those “brands”

View on HN

Because all the tech Apple acquired was acquired before it was a big recognisable brand. Also Apple are very good at making it look like they came up with it. Ask someone who doesn't follow the movements of big tech companies 'Who invented Siri?', 'Who invented TouchID?'etc they will say Apple.

You mention Siri as an example of Apple taking credit. Siri was on the App Store before Apple bought it and they kept the name.

But honestly, who cares but geeks about what the general population thinks about who invented it?

I worked at SRI, though not on Siri. (Wish I had; they got a nice payday when it was bought.) Siri was weaker before Apple bought it, because there was only so much they could do with the public APIs. Apple buying it was the best outcome. It allowed Siri to come into its full potential, while at the same time inspiring others to make their own.

The same happen with the Workflow app. It was a great app when it was independent but became much better when Apple bought it and integrated it into iOS.

> Siri was weaker before Apple bought it, because there was only so much they could do with the public APIs. Apple buying it was the best outcome.

Umm, this is exactly the problem the article talks about.

The fact that you had to pay obeisance to Apple to get access to private APIs and data is a failure of the anti-trust mechanisms.

The fact that Apple could just buy up Siri without anti-trust mechanisms kicking in meant they can just sit in their castle and let somebody else do the hard work.

Why would I trust random third parties with the level of access that Apple has? Should Apple also allow access to the Secure Enclave by third parties?

VCs don’t invest in startups to help them build low profit “lifestyle businesses”. They fully expect them to be acquired or rarely become public. Just as an anecdote that we are all familiar with, only two YC companies have gone public — Pagerduty and Dropbox - and Dropbox is still not GAAP profitable.

If the governments takes away the ability of companies to get acquired, investments in startups will dry up and $BigTech would be the only ones with money to do research.

I guess the line of reasoning above is that anyone concerned with remaining competitive in the global market should care, because (again, following the reasoning above) the general population is what decides on economic policy in a democracy.

Apple just acquired Dark sky weather and turn off the api, website, and android app. They look like a bunch of lazy dicks who can't be bothered to write their own weather app to me.

I don't know what the current figure is but traditionally Apple's spending on R&D has been quite low for the size of the business.

People here are constantly lamenting the lack of good multitouch on anything but a Macbook, especially in Linux. If Fingerworks had stayed as an independent company they could also sell their touchpads to Microsoft for the Surface. Of course Apple bought them before they were a well known brand; maybe that's why their acquisitions are more successful.

Where do we draw the line between innovation and new features?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com