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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

> This is probably the only tech acquisition that's ever made me sad.

For me, it was… Atlassian buying HipChat Salesforce buying Tableau Salesforce buying Slack Microsoft buying GitHub (sort of) Alteryx buying Trifacta Oracle buying Cerner

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Oracle buying Sun?

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

Has more real value ever been destroyed in the service of paper value?

Arguably yes, though I am including DEC in this equation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq#Acquisition_by_Hewlett-...

That was a hit and they basically obliterated Sun.

But if you’re looking at lost value, AOL buying TimeWarner (and the Sun parts of Netscape).

I’d say the GitHub acquisition is the exception in that list. It seems to go well from my perspective as a user.

I’m not terribly upset because I think it could be worse if others bought them, but I think they’ve stagnated and had lots of stability problems since the purchase.

I don't agree on the 'stagnated' part. A lot has come out of Github since that acquisition. I am actually impressed how it has managed to mature into a fully enterprise grade ecosystem yet somehow maintaining its allure and user friendliness that smaller developer teams enjoy.

I don’t think it’s enterprise at all. I can’t create groups to sync with AD. I can’t link organizations. I can’t link accounts to AD to pull even info like name.

They’ve added a lot of “social media” functions like feeds and stuff.

I like what they’ve done with Actions though, that’s neat.

> Salesforce buying slack

I'm a very heavy slack user for work and personal workspaces and haven't seen anything bad yet, though I also don't pay the bill for those organizations. Im sure over time it may get worse, but for the meantime this seems to be one of those rare acquisitions where the child company is doing so well the parent may be afraid to touch it (rightfully so).

> Microsoft buying Github

This one haunts my dreams. Microsoft is drawing a huuuuge moat around the developer experience. I have to imagine they will tighten the noose within the next 5 years. Ditto for Gaming as they now own half the games industry: EA, Activision/Blizzard, Obsidian, and many many more.

don't forget Salesforce buying Heroku. and i say that as a guy who makes his living with Salesforce.

Heroku has stagnated massively in the face of upstart competitors like Vercel, Fly and Render.

Even their new public roadmap shows little of significance, it might as well be in maintenance mode.

+ Atlassian buying Trello, IMO

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