Apple buys a company every three to four weeks | Hacker News Reader

Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

bbc.com

188 pointsra7147 comments

So ~15 companies a year? That doesn't sound outrageous for a company with billions and billions of dollars in the bank, and billions more coming in every quarter.

edit: If anything there's probably immense pressure on Cook to buy buy buy more stuff. I don't think anyone inside Apple wants to have a repeat of stuff like old Apple maps or other products that just languished and died internally while external companies innovated. Easier to just spray the money & acquisition cannon around indiscriminately.

The issue is not the money - it's the ability to integrate.

M&A and cooltech is by far the easiest part. Making use of the tech, the talent, operational integration, re-writes vs. integration, product alignment, etc. it's very hard on every level.

What do you do with the VP of a 50 person company, now they are managers in a little team, the software might be discarded, or just a few ideas used from it etc. etc..

You only need 1 to pay off for it to be worth it. The rest can be deprecated and team reallocated.

Not saying it is right, but makes sense for a business of that scale.

Maybe... Google seems to be taking that strategy but it feels like it leads to some kind of flaw in their thinking around product support.

How long has it been since Google had a notable successful acquisition? I'm asking because I can't think of anything recent.

It usually takes a while for an acquisition to be labeled a success, right?

In 2014 Firebase, Stackdriver and DeepMind (who then made AlphaGo). There's also Waze from 2013. The only thing I could call out after that is Kaggle in 2017. Maybe they will make something out of this year's Fitbit acquisition, but that's a bit early to tell.

I guess I wasn’t thinking about acquisitions so much as “you only need one success”. They throw a lot out there I guess hoping some of them will pay off, but it leaves them coming off as scattered to the outside.

There is a hidden principle-agent problem where the original company's intent gets distorted to align with broader corporate objectives.

The total market the acquired company could have penetrated never gets developed and fundamentally they decide to take an exit now for less risk and more cash early for what could have been a stronger contribution for the economy on the whole via a well-exploited niche.

A mundane example would be how the developers behind Firewatch were acqui-hired by Valve. They had a well-developed following and a hotly anticipated second product, an original single-player IP, somewhat rare nowadays. Half the team dissolved to work on Steam and the rest funneled themselves into Half-Life: Alyx. The new game was delisted from development.

No this is not quite it.

These acquisitions are not 'big bangs' like VC investments where one will make the bank.

They are large and small investments across the board - some for know-how, some for talent, some for product, some for brand (ie Beats), some for code etc..

An acquisition is expensive beyond the price tag, especially in terms of opportunity cost if you bet on the buy and it fails.

As someone who have assisted with acquisitions, the tech part is often the most straight forward (unless you're dealing with multi-cloud solutions). The most challenging part is the re-alignment the culture and value of the acquired firm.

There's a delicate art in comforting the new members of the family that we're all in this together while systemically replacing their middle management with more suitable candidates.

I have to imagine any executive leadership team that agrees to an Apple acquisition is only looking at the exit package of stock they'll be counting in a couple years. They know what they're signing up for and know how the game works better than anyone. It's their setup for getting into venture capitol investing, retirement, etc. For a very small few they might stick around because they genuinely want to be part of the company's future.

Often the payouts are necessarily big enough, it entirely depends.

And just because you're an 'exec' at an 'ok startup' doesn't mean you're generally qualified at that level. It's very hard to jump to another, similar job in the field.

Maps hasn’t languished at all.

Just going to also assert that Apple Maps has significantly improved head over heels over the years here in Canada.

YMMV.

This is true. Apple Maps has improved significantly. I still wouldn't trust it like I trust Google Maps though.

Sadly Apple Maps’ POIs are still way behind Google Maps. I can usually treat Google Maps POIs as the ground truth now, after asking locals turned out to be wildly less accurate several times. I even had multiple Taxi drivers taking their own way instead of following gmaps and it was a total failure.

Google Maps has been playing catch up for the past year on features Apple Maps added in 2018.

https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps

At some point, does it become silly for the biggest companies to attempt their own solutions instead of just buying the one with the most traction or best implementation?

One example might be how Amazon never got into self-driving cars themselves, but then last year bought Zoox.

I work in health care. I also work for one of the biggest health care companies in the world. They are losing market share to smaller, more agile companies. Smaller companies who can whip out apps and solutions way faster than the company I work for.

Their solution is to buy the companies whose technology they want to leverage for their own, similar to what Apple is doing. This is a good tactic, but then creates another separate issue - how do you integrate all of these companies and their tech and employee's into your massive structure?

This has now created a huge bottleneck in that M&A (mergers and acquisitions) are tasked are buying companies and then having to take several years before they can fully integrate them into our company. It is a painfully slow process, but they still believe its faster to do it this way, then to try and build the tools and applications on their own.

I feel like the jury is out on whether this is a good long term strategy or simply replacing one problem for another.

I suppose it all depends on the extant in-house expertise. If you're in a "we don't know what we don't know" situation with respect to the problem, it's less risky to buy the experts with a proven record rather than spend an indefinite amount of time and money on R&D which might not yield success. Integrating into a familiar bureaucracy is at least the devil you know

There's no point in buying an unrelated business that you're going to leave operating as usual - you might as well just invest that money on the stock market instead, or pay it out to your shareholders. So presumably if a company is buying a solution to X then it believes it can gain a competitive advantage by integrating X into the rest of its business.

Given that, I would've thought that the earlier you buy the thing, the easier it is to integrate it with the rest of your company and the quicker you start gaining the benefits of that. Waiting to buy the winner shouldn't be any cheaper than buying all the competitors in the field at the start, because it's no secret how everyone's doing. So the only reasons not to develop in-house from day 1 are if you're not as good at developing things as a small independent company, or there's some other advantage that you're missing, or the option value from the fact that small companies can go bankrupt on their own (but that's only really applicable if the business is capital-intensive).

can you name a business that is completely unrelated to Apple or Amazon and would not see significant benefits from being absorbed?

For apple :- a farm, cattle station, cement factory, brick maker, carpets, upholstery, chicken farm the list goes on

Introducing Apple Chicken.

New improved version, only gives you the runs if you eat it holding the wrong way....

imagine having to go to the genius bar to get your chicken cooked the right way

The way I'd think about it is "would that business put any time into a partnership with Apple/Amazon if the chance came up". I guess you could argue that any business above a certain size would consider them worth talking to for some kind of cross-promotional deal even if that doesn't make a lot of sense on the face of it - Caterpillar? Hilton? But I think small focused companies outside of Apple/Amazon's core field wouldn't want to spend time on something like that. So B2B, non-tech, smallish companies - which by their very nature I can't name a lot of, but there's a lot of them out there.

In economic theory there is no benefit to diversification (which is what a company does when it absorbs another company) unless there are organisational improvements shared between the companies. If the acquired company is truly completely unrelated there would be no benefit at all as Apple isn't able to improve the running of an unrelated company. Being bought out by Apple might be a nice outcome for any company's shareholders (as they might get a premium on the their share prices), but technically there would be no improvement to the business in terms of expected revenue.

I think it has an effect on people working for apple.

At some point acquiring other companies will affect the ability to hire and retain developers. It might also be a clue that their ability is diminished, or that internal ideas are not being promoted - whatever process Steve Jobs used to bring the good stuff to light.

> Easier to just spray the money & acquisition cannon around indiscriminately.

Apple does nothing, especially anything involving money, indiscriminately.

I'm just squarely keen on learning from their acquisition integrations team, that's where the magic happens to make any good use of these acquisitions.

> That doesn't sound outrageous

how it doesn't? it does!

It’s fine... Until Apple buys the software tools your working with and then kills the support for running on anything outside the Apple ecosystem.

Or, until they buy an enterprise grade NoSQL server and open source it?

https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/apple_foundationdb_op...

I'm beginning to think maintaining competitive markets requires broader criteria. Like any of super-majority share of: market volume, revenue within a market, influence over market, consumer harm, significant reduction in number of competitors.

Why?

Because right now price is about the only criteria really considered today. You can stifle innovation and competition as long as the prices stay low.

It seems to me that Apple buys companies because they want to research and build a technology into their products, rather than eliminate competitors. It seems to me they’re more interested in the talent than the market.

That kind of behavior I attribute to Facebook.

And yet I still couldn't use the fingerprint reader in one of my laptops because Apple bought the supplier. Driver updates stopped soon thereafter, sadly right around the time of a major Windows release and my reader was SOL.

Huh? This seems totally backwards to me. Stripping down an acquisition to incorporate it into the acquiring company is the ultimate competitor crushing strategy; buy up all the best technology and sell it exclusively through your locked-down walled garden. Apple products integrate with Apple products and nothing else by design. Granted, the Facebook product is an absolute cancer on society, but Facebook's acquisitions have continued to thrive while still maintaining their original product visions e.g. whatsapp, instagram, oculus. Frankly, I think you're viewing things fan-colored glasses.

>Huh? This seems totally backwards to me. Stripping down an acquisition to incorporate it into the acquiring company is the ultimate competitor crushing strategy;

It's not as if Apple lacks competition capable of doing the exact same.

I never stated otherwise.

Most small businesses fail. Nobody put a gun to their head and told them to take the money and the W2 salaries; each company was in a position to assess their own situations and make their own choice about whether to be acquired or try to stay independent and succeed or fail on their own. Other companies have said “no” to Apple in the past, Dropbox most famously.

I agree with your comment. None of it contradicts anything I wrote.

Upon reflection after a second read through, you’re right: we agree more than we disagree, and any disagreement I have on my end amounts to mere nitpicking when I put it in words in a box. At least in this thread.

Cheers, mate!

Perhaps so, but that encourages innovation on competing features from other parties. Consider Prime Sense, whose technology started out with the Kinect and ended up as the FaceID sensor in iOS.

Microsoft still had a Kinect after the acquisition, and a host of other time-of-flight devices have shown up in the market (Intels RealSense camera, Leap motion), and other companies have pursued TOF sensors in phones using alternative technologies.

Just because one company disappears doesn’t mean the concepts disappear along with it. And if they did entirely disappear when the company is acquired, that (to me) is indicative of how well the technology was performing in the marketplace to begin with.

Regardless of the reason, the effect is still the same. Technology that could have been more broadly used is limited to Apple's ecosystem. Innovations might not happen, or happen later, because the company that would have made them is acquired and the talent is redirected to work on Apple products. Products that could have competed with Apple's products end up being part of Apple's products instead.

Are you lacking in competition in any market that Apple (per the original article) competes in?

> price [for consumers] is about the only criteria really considered today.

Blame the past 50 years of GOP-dominated Supreme Court jurisprudence, which has steadily eroded antitrust enforcement. Vote for the Democratic party in Senate and Presidential races, and something might happen to fix this in about 30–40 years when the Court turns over enough to give Democrat-appointed Justices a majority.

The weakening of antitrust enforcement wouldn't have happened without the support of liberal economists like Thurow and Galbraith, and D judges have until very recently voted the same way as R judges.

Fortunately, changing the antitrust criteria 'merely' requires convincing Congress, which is doable within a saner timeframe.

> Because right now price is about the only criteria really considered today. You can stifle innovation and competition as long as the prices stay low.

In the US, maybe. Other jurisdictions take different views.

That's how the proper antitrust regulation worked in the US before Borkism took over in the Reagan era.

You should read "Goliath" by Matt Stoller. In it he reviews the history of monopoly and how the US definition of it changed from the 1930s to the 1980s. Interesting historical read and it reinforced to me that both monopolies and competitive markets are societal constructs, not facts of nature.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/...

It's worth noting that he is a highly opinionated writer on the subject. Seemingly, his raison d'etre is to further antitrust -- though, in his case, it seems to be a vague, expansive and shifting notion.

He effectively just seems to be against any "big" business.

He definitely has opinions. I found the history useful, but he has an viewpoint that he argues for.

Happy to hear recommendations for contrasting viewpoints if you care to share.

I like this list. I'd add collection of behavioral data of a significant proportion of the population.

("Behavioral data" and "significant proportion" would require good definitions; I am not a policy maker, so I am leaving it to those sharper than me.)

Apple has the majority of profits in the smartphone industry in the US, and even globally. To me, that warrants a major anti-trust investigation into: the App Store and pre-included apps like iMessage being fused into the SMS system on their devices! Bring them down to size.

Is that a lot? How many does a similarly positioned company buy, say Alphabet, Dell, or Cisco? Seems like every time I find a neat niche networking or security product I like, Cisco or someone ends up buying it. Context would’ve been helpful in this article.

Alphabet is faster. As Cory Doctorow mentioned in one of his talks, they buy companies more often than most people go to the grocery store.

So...26 a year? That's in the same range.

Everyone I know goes once a week. once every two weeks and you'd start to run out of fresh produce in week 2.

I live in Japan and go around twice a week, some people go near everyday here. Small homes, small fridges and portions, convenient walkable neighborhoods, desire to eat fresh.

I live in the US and go three times a week. We could go less often without any real inconvenience, but the store is right across the street from my daughter's day care, so it's an easy stop in our daily errands, and that way we don't need to worry about planning much in advance (and we always have fresh bread, fruit and veg, which is nice).

Interesting.

I was going once every three weeks to reduce Covid risk, household of two, normal American-sized fridge with freezer, cooking six nights a week. We would run out of vegetables during the third week, but it had the advantage that we ate all the veggies!

We get stuff delivered here. We use three of the major supermarkets. I prefer to choose my own veg, but in the current situation I'll accept not being able to.

In Europe, people generally have much smaller larders and refrigerators. There are more markets, they’re smaller, and people visit them more often — ideally almost every day for the freshest produce.

Oh, also, the public rosters of companies bought by Google aren't accurate. I know because I worked for a company that was bought by Google. It was technically a "merger" and escaped some scrutiny that way? I'm hazy on the details but either way it doesn't show up in lists.

Via the linked dupe threads, here's a list of their known acquisitions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

> Mr Cook told the shareholders meeting that the acquisitions are mostly aimed at acquiring technology and talent

What’s the median acquisition size? Heck, what’s the 75th percentile?

I’d bet most of these acquisitions are of lifestyle businesses with few/no paths to scale. Probably just aimed at the tech teams or execs.

Nothing much to see here

It's mostly about talent but nobody wants to embarrass the entrepreneurs?

Why is it embarrassing?

They obviously did well enough to be worth acquiring.

An acqui-hire is typically considered a failure for VC-backed startups. (Not that one should necessarily be embarrassed for “failing” in this way, but that’s just the reality).

I could think of worse things than getting acqui-hired by a FAANG and made a Director or something in the company. Not sure that's much of a failure honestly!

Success to you. Failure to the investors.

It's certainly better than going insolvent, but it also implies that you company has failed to reach the usual hockey-stick growth targets and that your IP is "worthless" enough to be bought as overhead for hiring someone. So, while not a total failure, it's really not a compliment.

I think, from reading the back and forth here, that there seem to be a number of different types of acqui-hires and as such we can't really be sure to what extent the acqui-hire represents a failure.

See the example of Tesla 2013. Apple is not hiring to keep the startup or the innovation. But for the up or even worst:for the talent. Its like selling your house to the scrap guy

Typo "for the IP or talent"

Yeah - I mean I guess you can make it sound bad.

But a ‘pivot’ is essentially the same thing - in terms of what gets scrapped.

I see an acquihire as the market actually validating your company value even if you haven’t pivoted into a hockey stick product.

How is it validating? In an acquihire situation the company gets bought and then everything but the people is flushed down the toilet.

You used to be working on AI powered eye glasses that could tell when fruit is perfectly ripe but now you work on an in house travel expense system the Apple sales people use to log their Uber bills.

> You used to be working on AI powered eye glasses that could tell when fruit is perfectly ripe but now you work on an in house travel expense system the Apple sales people use to log their Uber bills.

Is it that realistic? Why would anyone take such a deal? Why would Apple expect those employees to stay, and given this why would they pay a premium?

My sense was that generally teams are hired because they have proven that they are competent in something specific that Apple wants to do, even if the actual code isn’t used directly.

Sometimes aquihires are just execs at big companies helping their VC or angel friends save face and keep the deal pipeline open.

It entirely depends on the company.

- Turi became TuriCreate/CoreML

- Faceshift became Memoji

- Workflow became Shortcuts

- FoundationDB is unchanged and underpins iCloud

- Shazam is unchanged

Many of the acquired companies can be directly seen in shipping products (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...)

Worfklow is maybe one of my favorite acquisitions by them because it's far easier to run something like this as an OS-level daemon with OS-level permissions than a third-party app. Funnily enough, the Workflow team was folded into Proactive Intelligence, i.e. the old Cue team, another startup that was essentially acquihired for the same reason. Cue was trying to extract all kinds of information from your email, but it turns out you need more than email, which is possible when you run as an OS-level daemon.

When a lifestyle business is bought-out, assuming the employees are also significant equity stakeholders, do they typically get compensated for the loss of expected lifetime earnings - and/or a contractual right to buy back their IP from Apple, given that an acqui-hire is not guaranteed to be in the employees’ best-interests - or be long-lasting?

Just asking - because if my company were to be acqui-hired I have serious doubts about my ability to stay at Apple specifically - given (for example) their prohibition on most of their FTE SWEs having a personal GitHub account or doing any kind of moonlighting. What does Apple do when they really want to acqui-hire a company but the people they want don’t want to work at Apple without special-exemptions from the normal rules?

They wouldn't extend an offer to you in this case. Acqui-hires have no upside for employees and barely any for founders. Some small return to investors to sign off on the acquihire. Usually most people still have to interview for their jobs.

Acquihires do often have employee upside, in the form of large stock-based compensation grants or bonus payouts, typically spread over a vesting period of several years. There's no point in the acquihire if you don't retain the employees, and relative to the cost to acquire the company these payouts aren't huge.

You're right that often people do have to interview to remain employed (and thus to receive these benefits).

> do have to interview to remain employed

Would that be a full-on interview as if they were applying for a job, or just some kind of "cultural fit" screening?

It seems contradictory to me: if the hire is important enough to spend a lot of money on (even via an earn-out) then why alienate them with uncertainty about the offer?

I guess the assumption is they don't have a better offer?

But if a few key employees get together then don't they have the ability to scuttle the whole deal? "Keep doing this thing that Apple was willing to buy, but on better terms, and look for a new buyer" sounds like a pretty good alternative to "take Apple's earn-out on Apple's terms with nonzero risk of getting nothing."

It varies between no interview at all, and a full interview exactly like a new hire. Both are done. Interviews are more common these days, because if they're skipped, existing employees may resent the acquihire folks for not having to jump through the same hoops.

This is another reason for the vesting payouts for employees. If there wasn't some reward, and you had to do a full interview, why not just interview somewhere else?

Regarding your last question, it is true that a cabal of disgruntled employees could cause problems for an acquihire. I have seen cases where the acquisition was contingent on a certain number of engineers passing the interviews. Another good reason for a big financial incentive.

I don't think that would lead to better terms in a new deal. The next buyer is likely to learn that the company's employees boned the interviews, which is going to look bad.

> existing employees may resent the acquihire folks for not having to jump through the same hoops

I guess that makes sense, but it’s also a reason to view the hoops as less of tech screen and more of a hazing ritual.

I appreciate that having to whiteboard a recursive permutation generator is a rite-of-passage for most of us, it gets old, quick. One's ability to do well in a whiteboard interview is not the best indicator of one's ability to deliver value to the organisation. If I were a hiring-manager I'd prefer to go-over the candidate's portfolio of work rather than grill them over the computational complexity of a logic puzzle.

If some new people from an acquired company were to join and I heard they skipped the third-year CS undergrad oral finals simulation step I'd be glad that there's some progress being made - I wouldn't feel resentful at all.

"I had it bad when I was younger, therefore you should too" is amongst the worst our instinctive behavioral tropes.

In my experience with most acquihires, your “upside” is basically a new hire package at the mid-high end (sometimes I see low) of external offers + a potentially expedited interview process.

The hypothetical case I was describing was when the employees (say, 1-5 people) are also the sole shareholders.

Supposing I write a _killer app_ with a friend and get a patent for it - and it ends up with tens of millions of users quickly - and Apple really wants it for themselves at short notice (too short a notice for them to try to recreate the software code, sic their legal team to invalidate the patent and market it to get enough users) - how far would Apple bend to accommodate my _think different_ attitude?

You’re describing an acquisition including IP and not an acquihire. I’m not sure how much Apple cares about idiosyncrasies of founders for potential full acquisitions but I imagine they matter quite a bit for a run of the mill acquihire.

All big tech companies are the same. Cisco, for example, I think buys one every 6 weeks or so.

Apple is the biggest monopoly in the US right now. Hands down.

They get to get away with everything!

Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. all get hammered on the daily in the US and in the EU. But, Apple is a golden child that can do no wrong.

Do you people not realize that they've created a peer-pressure device in the form of the iPhone by packaging SMS and iMessage into 1 app called "Messages"?

How is that even legal?!

The app should be broke up into 2.

You should be given options on what messaging app you want to install.

Their practices are anti-competitive.

15-30% cut via the App Store for Apple?! Is this a joke?!

Keep downvoting me, fanboys! Long live the resistance!

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? We're trying for something different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How about the Apple Music store being embedded into the default Music App? Blatantly anti-competitive against Spotify.

Sure, that would make a good point as part of a relevant comment somewhere.

> Do you people not realize that they've created a peer-pressure device in the form of the iPhone by packaging SMS and iMessage into 1 app called "Messages"? How is that even legal?!

https://www.gihosoft.com/iphone-tips/best-messaging-apps-ios...

I am well-aware of these.

The issue is the joint-packaging.

If we went hard on Microsoft for packaging IE and WMP into Windows, we should go equally ballistic about iMessage and SMS being fused in together. They should be broken up.

We didn't "go hard on" Microsoft for mere bundling of basic tools like media viewers and web browsers. It was because they were using that dominant position (which is perfectly fine to have) to behave anticompetitively (which is not).

> "behave anticompetitively"

What is Apple doing when it bundles iMessage and SMS together? Deception and anti-competitive behavior, that's what!

How so? What is their nefarious plan and how do they go about it? If you are the one seeing the truth and you want to be taken seriously you need to do better than just throw around words like “monopoly” and “anti-competitive” with no justification whatsoever.

Bundling of iMessage and SMS = reduction in competition by integration.

I can read, and you’ve already written that. But there are logical bits missing between your premise and your conclusion. Is there any measurable effect? Is say WhatsApp adoption rate significantly lower on iOS because of this? How much more anticompetitive is it than just bundling a SMS app with every phone?

Anything a company does to improve its market share is a reduction of competition, the threshold for anticompetitive behaviour is higher than that. Not saying Apple never does anything anticompetitive (they do), but iMessage is a very stupid hill to die on.

How about the Apple Music store being embedded into the default Music App? Blatantly anti-competitive against Spotify.

Right, but that wasn’t the point you were making. I wasn’t arguing that Apple was never anti-competitive.

Integration by itself is not anticompetitive.

Going back to the Microsoft example, Microsoft got into trouble, not because they were bundling a web browser with an OS (which would be stupid to not have), but because they were forbidding OEMs to include any other browser on pain of revoking their agreements. That is anticompetitive.

If Apple were forbidding the installation of WhatsApp because it competes with iMessage, that would be the most direct equivalent to what Microsoft was sanctioned for.

Anticompetitive behavior is a legal term with a specific definition, it does not apply to software that decreases a competitor's potential marketshare only by way of doing something a competitor could be doing on their own.

dupe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26247821

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26248716

How can one track these acquisitions? Does crunch base offer such a feature?

And this is why we have a centralised Internet.

In all stock deals, how much does that end up being? Like 1 share Apple per 1000 stock options of the startup?

I misread like Apple buys a company every three to four weeks.

>Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

I would too.

The HN commentary on this article is amusing to me. Every story about a big tech company on this forum is a lecture on our degenerate age of failed antitrust law, but when it comes to Apple we're treated to a litany of "so what?". Honestly, I don't mind Apple's acquisitions (though I do wish I was living in a world where I could buy an M1 the same way I can buy an i7), but I just felt compelled to drop this little nugget of off-topic meta-commentary. Carry on.

Because of this:

> Measured by value, Apple’s acquisitions are actually far more restrained than those of many of its tech rivals. Microsoft paid $26bn for LinkedIn, Amazon paid $13.7bn for Whole Foods and Facebook paid $19bn for WhatsApp. Apple’s ten largest purchases put together would still be worth far less than any of those deals.

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if ALL of Apples acquisitions were less than $13 bn.

I don't see why the price Apple paid matters at all. What Apple does with the acquisitions I think is far more relevant. LinkedIn, Whole Foods, and WhatsApp have continued to thrive after acquisition, all of Apple's acquisitions are gutted and scavenged for parts to incorporate into their locked-down walled garden. Don't get me wrong, it's a great business strategy and the reason that Apple products are typically superior to the competition, but it's far more hostile and anti-competitive compared to the cited examples.

Is this a distinction without a difference? LinkedIn's tech is wholly owned and funded by Microsoft. If you are competing with LinkedIn, you are competing with Microsoft regardless of the name on the website. Since more diverse competition is the goal, I don't believe these situations are actually different.

The distinction is that the other examples listed continue to exist in their original form with their original vision and use-case intact, without disrupting the user experience by being shutdown and reconstituted as part of an Apple exclusive product or service.

That's a fair point, but I think you've cherry picked a few very notable examples and made an apples to oranges comparison. The other tech companies acquire hundreds of small companies and shut them down. Google is notorious for this. The examples you used were big companies with massive user bases before the acquisition. I suspect Apple's most notable acquisition to date is Beats, and it continues to operate under it's own brand today.

I didn't cherry-pick anything, those were the examples listed in the article and quoted to me in response to my original comment. As I already stated, I don't have a problem with acquisitions, I am aware that Apple isn't the only company that does this, I'm just pointing out the contrast in tone and rhetoric when it comes to Apple vs pretty much every other big tech company on this website.

No offence, but this latest comment doesn't fit with the original comment I replied to. You were clearly commenting on what Apple does with their acquisitions, not the tone of the response, and that is what I was replying to. You said "What Apple does with the acquisitions I think is far more relevant" and then went on to detail how you thought they handled their acquisitions differently.

That said, I don't agree that the tone is different for Apple vs any other company. I would have agreed years ago, but it's not longer my observation today.

I don't mean this to sound snarky so I hope you don't interpret it that way, but I think the flow of the conversation makes more sense if you read from my original comment. I was only responding to what was written to me. I made the point about Apple's acquisition behavior because the reply to my original comment suggested my observations could be explained by the cost of Apple's acquisitions as compared to other examples listed in the article by other companies. My response described why I don't think the amount Apple paid should really matter in this context, especially with respect to examples offered to me for comparison, then you came and suggested it's a distinction without a difference, and when I explained the differences I see, you then accused me of cherry-picking, but the context you're missing is that I was never trying to debate Apple's acquisition practices to begin with.

If you were never trying to debate Apple's acquisition practises, then you probably shouldn't have participated in the debate about them. Someone else started it, yes, but you then replied to them. That makes it fair to respond to your reply and address the contents of that reply. You directly commented on how Apple assimilates their acquisitions, and implied others do not. That is what I am addressing.

I completely understand that's not what your top level comment was about, but I didn't reply to your top level comment.

I think you might feel insulted by my use of cherry picking. I apologize for that. I can understand why you might feel that way, but it was meant more in the sense that the examples referred to are not comparable, not that you did it on purpose out of bad faith.

I don't feel insulted, it is simply a statement of fact that I did not cherry-pick since I did not pick those examples at all. I did not presume you were suggesting I "did on purpose" what was done by someone else.

Of course you're free to respond to my comment, but I certainly did not imply that others do not assimilate their acquisitions (such is an obvious falsehood), I simply compared Apple's acquisitions to the examples offered to me in comparison. I understand you take issue with those examples but once again, they're not my examples.

Anyway, we're just going in circles at this point, I'm gonna bow out here. Have a nice night.

You are probably right about the user experience, but

> with their original vision and use-case intact

This is a difficult point to make in the face of what’s becoming if WhatsApp and Instagram. Certainly, the vision has changed quite a lot and now Facebook is tearing down the last insulating walls between them and WhatsApp users’ data. Same for Nest, for example. Sure, it continued as a brand for a while, but that was just a facade.

Microsoft might be a better case than Facebook for your argument: LinkedIn and GitHub seem to have more or less stayed the same (but then so has Beats, as well, and that certainly is an outlier).

It's not the price that necessarily matters but the market share, which is often represented in the price. A company like Facebook (a large social media corporation) buying WhatsApp (a large messaging app) creates an even bigger company in terms of influence on the market. Apple might be buying companies for their tech, but their acquisitions don't just automatically increase their influence or market share through consolidation.

For example, I would be a lot less worried about Exxon buying small petroleum tech startups that don't own any oil fields than I would be about Exxon buying Shell, a major competitor in terms of market share.

You're getting downvoted, but I agree. I think Apple buys much earlier on in the process, like when it tried to buy Audion and then eventually grabbed SoundJam [1] as part of creating the original iTunes.

A more typical brand-preserved acquisition for Apple might have been when it bought Siri (originally an app) or if it had succeeded in buying Dropbox (which probably also would have retained the name).

[1]: https://panic.com/extras/audionstory/

It's a smart business strategy to buy smaller companies with great potential, it probably has something to do with why Apple is the richest company on earth, but that strategy also snuffs out that potential company before it has a chance to reach the prodigious scale of a WhatsApp or a LinkedIn. Presumably, Apple knows how to pick winners, so it's likely that at least a small fraction of Apple's acquisitions would have gone on to become ubiquitous house-hold names had they not been sold. Alas, it was fated not to be, but who knows what could have been?

> Presumably, Apple knows how to pick winners, so it's likely that at least a small fraction of Apple's acquisitions would have gone on to become ubiquitous house-hold names had they not been sold.

Not necessarily. If you’re only interested in acquiring technology, the commercial success of prospective acquisitions isn’t particularly relevant.

>I don't see why the price Apple paid matters at all.

Because it's a signal of how strong the acquisitions are.

Tech/talent acquisitions, like these, are far more benign than buying and killing strong rising competitors in your domain and consolidating power (e.g. Facebook and Instagram).

>all of Apple's acquisitions are gutted and scavenged for parts to incorporate into their locked-down walled garden

That's because they usually amounted to nothing end-user wise to begin with. They where just smaller specific technologies that, e.g. went to be incorporated into the OS or similar...

Having worked at Amazon’s retail division and at Apple probably gives me some credibility to share a different perspective. Perhaps? :)

Companies that acquire smaller companies and let them run independently typically create a schism in the culture — a division of haves/have-nots and run the risk of overspending without justified returns (Twitch for example retains typically Silicon Valley perks but doesn’t generate as much revenue as Retail site does).

Apple acquisitions on the other hand are solely about technology & integration. I can only think of Beats being their only acquisition that has some independence still. I don’t know what’s going on there though. But I work with a dozen or so teams that were all Apple acquisitions and their entire charter is build for Apple and shut everything else down. Makes it much simpler to organize people/teams and makes purpose of teams super clear from a product perspective.

Amazon, Microsoft and others’ acquisitions make it seem very much like a conglomerate of sorts. I guess that has benefits too — typically not in core technologies though.

Perhaps I just disagree that is hostile or anti-competitive from that perspective. It seem like FB’s acquisition of WhatsApp (and similar moves by others) is more characteristic of anti-competitive behavior (ie capturing potential competitors early etc)

Well said. The HN crowd- normally critical and hyper-rational- is incredibly loyal to Apple, interestingly.

I’ve noticed even I unconsciously look for more opportunities to give Apple leeway. Maybe developers do the same after being so entrenched in the ecosystem.

Maybe years ago, but I feel like this is the opposite of reality today. I've seen far more hypocritical criticism of Apple on HN than baseless support for a number of years now.

This sort of perception about community bias comes up with every $BigCo. Then the comments complaining about it get highly upvoted, undermining the supposed observation.

I think it has more to do with how our emotions subtly influence how we weight what we read. We're more likely to notice the cases we dislike/disagree with and let the ones we like/agree with glide by without affecting our impression of the community. Because of this, negative impressions and overgeneralization are much more common than the data really support.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Fair enough, and the search results are both illuminating and humbling, but I'll also offer that perceptions of community bias aren't necessarily wrong even though they aren't an absolute fact.

perceptions that aren't fact are much more likely to be actual bias rather than 'not necessarily wrong'

Part of the concern is Apple spends a ton of money marketing themselves as "pro-privacy and pro-consumer, more than those "other" $BigCo's". I've seen people say they're immune to advertising and then beat the Apple drum many times.

I am so tired of this “marketing” angle, as if anyone having different priorities must be an idiot manipulated by the communication department of a large evil company. It’s been a trope since the 1990s.

Also, nobody is immune to advertising, so you can take these comments as seriously as the “sheeple” ones.

>Apple spends a ton of money marketing themselves as "pro-privacy and pro-consumer, more than those "other" $BigCo's"

I mean they also seem to deliver functionality that is pro-privacy, since of course their money doesn't depend on violating your privacy. Two of the other BigCo's business models are built on violating your privacy, and the other one certainly makes more money on its retail efforts by doing so.

So the scary quote marks up there seem a bit weird given the circumstances.

There's an analogous argument to be made about every $BigCo though. People's perceptions of these, and of how the community relates to them, are hugely conditioned by their pre-existing feelings.

This is pretty crazy. And it's pretty bad too.

I think one one interesting thing is that megacorps that seem to integrate big acquisitions (Amazon -> Whole Foods, Microsoft -> Github & LinkedIn, Facebook -> WhatsApp), all seem to be megacorps that don’t mind doing shit in a messy, scrappy way.

Whereas companies with a strong fixation on design & aesthetic seem to have a harder time. To fit into Apple, everything must look and feel like Apple. There could never be a new “Whole Foods” tab where things look and feel like Whole Foods. So Apple melts it down and recasts what it can into Apple - a lot like the Borg.

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