You can see the list in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...
I can't feel that we'd be much better off if MS had decided to lose billions on YouTube along with Bing and Google had pressed ahead with Google Video as a legitimate competitor.
Could they get any worse? Seriously does any normal thinking person really participate and contribute comments in that quagmire? I sometimes I thank Google and Yahoo for creating those honey pots for the internet brain-dead to vent their steam and vitriol, keeping them well away from stuff I like to constructively participate in.
Coincidence? No clue... Still, all the "OMG G+ will destroy youtube!1!" whining is looking pretty stupid...
"OMG LOL your house is burning down."
comments, ads, channels, even the way the video buffers is annoying smfh
But what I'm unable to accept is why the client won't let me buffer a video and erases everything just as soon as it's diplayed on the screen. It does not make downloading the content any harder - all it does is making me download the videos, whatch them and delete, because the official player sucks.
I just don't want to see Google dominating the world. Competition is nice.
There are parallels to the Internet Explorer/Netscape issue. Google provided a free service to everyone, killing any good paid services/products (which didn't integrate with Google Reader), except instead of taking advantage of their monopoly they just threw it away.
Now you have companies like Reeder, with a sufficiently large user base, who have to not only scramble to provide their own backend (or integrate with someone else's), but also scale it to the appropriate number of users literally overnight, which is not necessarily an easy task for a company which has, so far, only needed to have client-side developers (which is why most client apps, like Reeder, moved to using some other company for their backend instead of writing their own).
There was certainly no malicious intent, but they basically crushed an entire market and then abandoned it.
3.5 months.
Also, you'll be hard-pressed to find much upward pressure beyond free on this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators
"except instead of taking advantage of their monopoly". Woww way to telegraph the fact that you completely misunderstood the Internet Explorer/Netscape issue. Parallels with IE/Netscape are meaningless if the monopoly _gets thrown away_.
Sounds like the case.
On consideration, I'm a big fan of Google, Apple and Amazon. The thing that makes me (and probably others) nervous about all three is that they are too big. For instance, a monopolist strategy (Microsoft style) might appear someday.
With specific regards to Foursquare: note that the founder left to do Foursquare, and they're floundering right now. Maybe the vision was never sound to begin with.
Oh, not Y! (although some have speculated that Mayer move was a reverse-acquisition)
Android would have gone nowhere without being acquired, since OEMs and carriers wouldn't talk to such a small company.
(