I'm trying to think of a tech acquisition that was favorable, or at the very least not unfavorable for the consumer.
It seems like tech (maybe all) acquisitions almost always favor the buyer and not the consumer.
Does anybody have any good examples?
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Here are just a few examples:
- Keyhole (now Google Maps)
- Android Inc.
- Motorola Mobility
- GrandCentral (now Google Voice)
- NeXT
- Siri
In general, an acquired company initially became successful by bringing value to consumers. When that company is acquired, it gets more resources to bring more value to customers.
Don't forget Translate. It actually early on was an out-of-house service, but they kept buying companies and hiring people to work on it, and it got massively better. (So a lot like Keyhole/Maps: they took something it would cost you thousands of dollars a month for (literally, for Keyhole access), made it free, and made it better.)
Also Wordly
(became Google Docs)
Google Voice is effectively a dead product, isn't it? Doesn't seem that favorable to me.
I use it every single day. I wouldn't call it dead.
We'll see if Google tries to wholly replace it with hangouts. I wouldn't be mad unless it were missing features.
Dead meaning Google has put it out to pasture and will eventually kill it for good.
Dead in the sense that there has not been feature addition one for several years, yes.
That is probably best acquisition outcome. Most companies buy something good then change it until it sucks.
The best acquisition outcome is something like Android or Kinect, definitely not watching GrandCentral stagnate for years after acquisition.
Kinect was not an acquisition. MS licensed the device from PrimeSense. Apple bought the company recently.
Except for one feature that users have been screaming for, since near day one: MMS support.
And not in a hacked "if you're with TMo/Sprint, you -might- be able to get an email with the MMS in a format that's not reply-able" (and even that, only recently).
It's kept working for the last 3 years being awesome... Doesn't seem that dead to me.
Not completely. When they came out with hangout integration in gmail, I completely lost all ability to make outgoing calls for a long time.
Reader kept working until they turned it off.
Yes but it wasn't dead until they killed it.
I keep my 10 year old cell phone number alive and well on voice.google.com, it works great.
> Google Voice is effectively a dead product, isn't it?
Voice might be dead as a brand; Google's unification of communications trend might mean that the technology and functionality will eventually be merged into Hangouts.
Yes, Google Voice as a separate product is definitely going away. Its functionality will be subsumed by Hangouts, but nothing about that transition is clear to users.
Grand Central's acquisition was great for Americans and the few of us Canadians who were grandfathered in, but outside of the US (and Alberta for some reason), we lost a great service.
Keyhole became Google Earth, not Maps (they were created in-house)
I don't see the YouTube acquisition as being harmful.
Pixar is still making (some) good movies under Disney.
I'm sure there are more examples.
I would say it's debatable as to whether YouTube has been harmful. I think many aren't a fan of the licensing changes and other experience elements, but maybe those would have happened anyway.
I agree w/ Pixar to some extent, but it seems they have seen a slight decline in quality recently (Cars 2, Monsters University, Brave). I think particularly, they may be looking for more opportunities to exploit previous franchises vs. making quality films. Cars 2 was the best example of this, as was evident by the mounds of merchandise on store shelves following the release.
Again, both of these are debatable, but I still don't think you can say in either case that the acquisition was favorable to the consumer.
I think youtube wouldn't have managed to continue operations without a company like google stepping in. It was running massive bandwidth costs and did not have the ad network in place to monetize.
> Pixar is still making (some) good movies under Disney.
Pixar movie quality seems to have dropped, while Disney's have gone up after the acquisition.
http://i.imgur.com/H2s4hVL.jpg
Cars 2 was clearly a release for money (they make more money of Cars merchandise than they do from films), but the other films?
Even with a handful of merely good movies, we still have four outstanding Pixar films post-Disney.
Also, I'm really enjoying the increase in quality of Disney movies post-Pixar. Just saw Frozen last week and loved it.
But given the timeline of producing those types of films, I wonder how much of those four was already in-motion prior to the deal closing?
I'm sure that all of them were, actually, which makes the post-purchase Pixar picture less pretty.
I think what helps explain this image is that it's likely everything before Cars 2 was already in development prior to the acquisition. Pixar seems to have lost some of their magic, however Disney is certainly stepping up their game.
The aesthetic divide between them is shrinking. I did not like Wreck It Ralph though. Not at all.
Before Pixar was acquired by Disney they had a partnership.
Another example: Bungie made some great games under Microsoft.
Funny, I would have held Pixar and YouTube up as counterexamples.
Android, Inc., also acquired by Google, seemed to work out well for the consumer, I would say.
I just don't get why anyone would hold android up as an example of success, given the comments in the following thread.
The gap between expectations & execution on android is tremendous. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7053108
The comparison isn't between "what Android could be under Google" and "what Android is under Google".
The comparison is between "what Android could be as an independent company" and "what Android is under Google".
I think ultimately Android is doing a lot better for a lot more people than it would have had it remained independent. I'm also having a hard time imagining anyone else that could've acquired them and achieved substantially better results (see: Microsoft's handling of the Danger acquisition).
I would argue Hotmail — Microsoft brought scaling and maturity, and kept a stronghold on the net long enough to actually threaten and push Google further. I doubt Gmail would have appeared without that acquisition.
But then again: the dozen other examples cited above are certainly better.
Apple buying NeXT.
A large number of Google acquisitions involve Google making a product free that before cost money. </done-defending-google>
Has the Instagram acquisition had any negatives for the consumer?
Yes, photos are no longer embedded in tweets.
Which means I don't see them anymore, which means I don't cringe at the filter abuse... Wait, actually, this HAS improved things for my particular tastes. :) But yeah, this is a pretty good example because the link between the acquisition and the damage to the product / end user is very obvious.
I'd say that's why they buy the companies...
YouTube