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Comment by PierceJoy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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