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Comment by sgerenser | Hacker News Reader

That may be true in this case, but I know folks who work at GitHub and LinkedIn and apparently Microsoft has mostly been keeping hands off at these companies. I’m sure at least some functions have been merged, but they seem to have done a surprisingly good job of it.

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I worked for Cisco for a long time: the integration of acquisitions in large companies (at least there) involves a calculus of size vs. current profits vs. complexity of integration. A company like Meraki or WebEx that’s making a lot of money and is larger or more complicated to integrate (because they have lots of their own systems and infrastructure) may get left alone, particularly if the former owners are aggressive about maintaining their existing culture. Cisco badges rather famously didn’t even work at Meraki offices, they were that pointed about keeping hands off. Scientific Atlanta was another one that got left alone for a long time, to the point that when Cisco people visited we all had to remember to dress up a bit because their offices were much more “casual Fridays means khakis and a polo shirt” than Cisco’s rather laid-back “it’s Friday, you’re lucky I’m wearing pants” culture. Once it suited Cisco to integrate them, though, the gloves came off and things moved much more quickly. So if the LinkedIn/GitHub leadership are aggressive about pushing a “hands off, we’re making money here” approach, Microsoft likely won’t deem it worth their time to bother as long as it’s not causing issues for the mother-ship. Much easier and cheaper to simply replace the hiring process for them and let the culture gradually acclimate to the larger company through attrition instead, while integrating the pieces that matter for now.

> A company like Meraki or WebEx that’s making a lot of money and is larger or more complicated to integrate (because they have lots of their own systems and infrastructure) may get left alone, particularly if the former owners are aggressive about maintaining their existing culture.

Thanks for this, it goes a long way toward explaining how Cisco has a software list and a written offer for GPL for their products, and Meraki has an unpublished email address (open-source@meraki.com) that they ignore for months on end.

I often wondered how Cisco, who was famously sued for GPL non-compliance after the Linksys acquisition, could repeat that blunder with Meraki.

I had similar experience at Amazon. My Amazon badge didn’t work at SF Twitch office.

After experiencing that I started to periodically write at amazons elevator whiteboards “Twitch is NOT Amazon” as little petty rebellion.

I'm pretty sure that's just how the badging system works. Amazon is orders of magnitude too big for 'everyone has access to everywhere' to make sense. When I traveled I sometimes had to talk to people (or send email) to make sure my badge was activated in a new location, even for offices in a different city but the same business unit. There were also restrictions based on whether you actually worked on a particular thing, even for non-acquisition parts of the company.

My badge was working at Amazon's SF location without anything of that. Only international travel required security contact.

Companies do this all the time. The Android team famously had their own isolated building for the longest time. Some of the newer acquisitions and bets are not accessible to Google employees. Most places have this sort of thing.

Github pre-Microsoft was an engineering-led wild west. They prioritized building tools like 3D file diff viewers (is that still around?) rather than optimizing the performance of the enterprise product and handling simple asks.

Their handling of enterprise customers is what lost them our business to Atlassian (also ugh).

Post-Microsoft, the product has been championed by the right owners. Enterprise works great, and we happily came running back. It only took five years for them to make the necessary adjustments.

Microsoft did that.

Bell Labs was an engineering driven wild west, ATT is much better now /s

Yeah, but the whole point of Bell Labs was to be an engineering driven wild west. They had so much money, they could afford throw money at PhDs and let them do cool stuff.

Tech tends to suffer from employees getting bored and wanting to do cool stuff that is totally disconnected from the business.

Which is the reason why UNIX escaped into the wild, Berkeley was eventually sued, and the Lion's commentary forbidden to keep being published.

Lion's is available to buy new now. It was unavailable for a while, but it's been back on the market for years now

I am pretty sure Github also felt the heat from Gitlab. There was a time, five or six years ago, when Gitlab was way ahead with impactful features like built-in CI and project management.

It seems that thanks to its network effect and Microsoft's guidance, Github managed to retake the lead.

I know folks who worked for at least 8 different Microsoft acquisition other than Github and Linkedin. All of them were squeezed into the 'Microsoft Way' within 3 years, with varying levels of success.

Microsoft was a large investor in Apple, Facebook, and Open.ai as well.

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