Didn't Oakley sunglasses try something similar when Luxottica first tried to buy them and then Luxottica managed to ruin them and ended up buying them much cheaper?
And hasn't Microsoft already done the same to a large number of startups?
Not just startups. They tried to acquire Nokia's handset business and initially failed. Stephen Elop (ex-MS) was installed as new CEO via investor pressure, Nokia abandoned their promising Linux-based phones and changed direction to Windows Mobile and then it was acquired after all. And failed.
Elop has, of course, denied having been a trojan horse for Microsoft at Nokia after the initial failed acquisiton attempt. Nokia's share price and profit lowered considerably during his tenure as a CEO, making it much cheaper to acquire.
Resisting acquisition can be very challenging, and takes a lot of energy and time.
"Promising" is an interesting choice of words here.
If anything, "promising" may be the wrong choice of words because it was arguably better and more mature than the equivalent debut iOS and webOS devices at launch. Of course that's cheating a bit, as the tech stack had some history behind it by that point. Still, for a line-incepting product it was very impressive execution, especially for a company that was still so hung up on a legacy product line at the same time (Symbian).
Personally, I used one as well and I don't find it very hard to imagine a version of the world where it could still be my preferred OS/ecosystem right now. It was truly a strange situation, and Nokia of the day one strange animal of a dissonant company. I don't know if Nokia would have made it without the MS interference -- but I think it didn't help.
This is a nice little nostalgia anecdote too that gets discussed on HN occasionally: http://nition.momentstudio.co.nz/2014/08/the-nokia-n9-alarm-...
The market at that point pretty much decided to skip that mess and go with IOS or Android.
Not at all. You just have to be a company that is a) private, b) not funded by VC, and c) profitable enough. Then all you have to do is just politely reject all incoming requests (e.g., "sorry, we are not interested [at this time]"). :-)
Lots of enterprise UI is like that for me, actually, including most PM software more complex than GH issues + boards. I find them extremely uncomfortable to use because I'm never confident I'm doing the right thing, or that what I'm doing is safe to do, or whether I'll be able to find the things I need again.
Slack is heading that way with some of their changes (the way drafts and threads are handled is juuuuust on the edge of putting it in that territory) but I still never feel "lost" for long, on there.
"We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade."[0]
They were right about the "something just like it" part.[1]
[0] https://slack.com/blog/news/dear-microsoft#.r90mkakwl
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/26/21195092/slack-new-user-r...