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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

I count more software that has been ruined and/or killed by acquisitions than the one bred by those.

Would agree in large part. I think the ones that were successful, they're successful enough that you forget it was an acquisition.

One off the top my head is Google Docs[1] which, for the longest time, I was pretty sure it was in-house tech. It's actually a number of acquisitions for the collaborative editor tech and then MS Office support.

It seems now that most incumbents have enough cash to not care about being that strategic about acquisitions.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs#History

I have not implied that all acquisitions are bad, but acquisitions to kill do not necessarily breed more better competition.

This acquisition sounds like the start of a twitch streamer joke.

"Have you heard about Figma?"

How about Android? The original team joined Google and pivoted their product once the iPhone was demoed.

Google Maps, Google Earth, Youtube, Android - all acquisitions.

It's the outsourcing of R&D. Behemoths used to have huge R&D budgets, now they let the market decide and harvest the successful solutions.

It's a market efficiency, I guess, otherwise they'd stick with the R&D approach.

The "used to" is a long long time ago. Before FAANG there was, for example Intel, Microsoft and Cisco, and they were very happy to vacuum up companies instead of holding a big r&d bag. Cisco got to be very good at it, in particular. And of course this is very much standard practice in pharma drug discovery.

I think the Golden Age of internal R&D was probably 1960-1980 at Bell Labs, IBM and the really large engineering cos like Boeing?

Bell is what I was thinking of, too.

Really depends on the management of the acquiring company. Adobe acquired Aldus and didn't help the Aldus market.

Weren't most of these ruined software bred by the prospects of acquisition in the first place?

Does this include the people who got paid out and went on to build new software companies?

This sounds like a very complicated study to design.

I think people thought because software cannot really be scarce that it was immune to the flaws of capitalism but that doesn't seem to be the case.

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