What you said might be true for the majority of acquisitions at that scale, but it is by no means a strict rule.
A tree can be chopped down in an afternoon.
All it takes is for the next CEO to decide to undo this and it's undone.
It’s a fundamental change in dynamic.
The CEO of a different company in charge isn't that different than an internally sourced CEO in charge.
If you want to boost numbers this quarter and don't care too much about intangibles, the incentives really push towards gutting the acquisition.
A CEO of an independent company has different incentives to a CEO of an acquirer.
The culture of Microsoft has gone through radical changes between gates, balmer and nadella.
But a culture isn't _only_ a reflection of the leadership, it's all the interconnections of people and organizations within the whole company.
A leader can come in and make changes, and often these changes first have to break everything that's there already; without care what replaces the broken structures is just chaos; by default that chaos is the governing culture without more inputs and work from leadership.
These changes are most pronounced when 2 large organizations become one because both cultures have inertia (whole foods / amazon, slack / salesforce, etc). But yes, of course when CEOs change there's change to the corporate culture, but because there's only the force from the CEO's changes not entire cultures bashing into entire other cultures, the changes tend to be more gradual.
I am not an MBA or sociologist or really anyone with a worthwhile opinion, I've just been around the block and have the stories to tell or retell...
Leadership, however, has changed.
(Extreme example, there are many others. Carly Fiorina's demolition of HP comes to mind.)
Linkedin was because everyone needed to have a “social” strategy back then and apart from maybe Dynamics, there’s no real synergy (I don’t like that word) between LinkedIn and Microsoft’s other businesses.
The GitHub acquisition was part of their plan to start repairing their fractured relationship with developers - almost a PR tool.
In both cases tight integration with the rest of the organisation makes less sense than Salesforce buying Slack - which is something that could be tied directly into Salesforce’s core business.
Buying Slack was Salesforce's way of getting back into that market.
1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/salesforce-takes-chatter-m...
I think that's a surface-level interpretation of the benefit to Microsoft. Azure and GitHub CI are a great match for using idle server compute for one and Codespaces is another.
I won’t be surprised if soon you can spin your backend on Azure in 2 clicks from VSCode because your code is on GitHub. Stuff like that. Maybe it won’t be advertise on the GitHub directly. But for sure it will be there available in 2 click on the Azure and VSCode.
The point of OP is not that the Borg will assimilate you from day one. Inertia, operational convenience and upper management laziness can delay the implementation of the hegemonic culture - why mess with a division that works? The point was that there should be zero expectation of changing the corporation's culture to match yours, they paid 27 billion so that you no longer have an independent voice on the market and be forced listen to them.
Because of how corporations operate, with strong internal diffusion of management and operational practices, the assimilation will happen, it's just a matter of speed. The old company has ceased to exist.
Culture will fade, politics will kick in, etc
I always assumed Microsoft is to blame, but apparently not!