Is Acquiring Always Bad?
Another form of this question I am trying to answer is when your favorite site gets acquired (I don’t mean lil ones like Wisdump, but large players like last.fm) is it always a bad thing? When Myspace was acquired by Fox Interactive Media many expected a huge corporate fallout because Myspace had gone corporate. That hasn’t happened. When Yahoo acquired Flickr, many expected the same, but the worst thing to happen was that Yahoo required you to login with a Yahoo ID.
Why is it people never think that being acquired by a larger company is a good thing because it gives the site they love more resources to work with and possibly move the company further along? Then again, how much activity do you really see from sites after being acquired? To me this is the bad thing about being acquired. It is not that anything major changes, the sites generally go untouched in today’s acquisitions because the larger companies are starting to understand that is what is best. However, the acquired company seems to be content with what has happened and maybe they feel they can take their foot of the pedal now.
Can anyone think of any examples of successful Web 2.0 sites that got acquired and then bombed afterwards?
Related reading:
Dodgeball comes to mind. After being acquired by Google, nothing really happened and the founder left.
By peroty on June 1, 2007 1:23 pm
Dodgeball was a weird thing. It was huge last year at SXSW like Twitter was this year, but then nothing. Google seems to be slow to move on things when the acquire them though, MeasureMap being an excellent example.
By Scrivs on June 1, 2007 2:04 pm
I think being acquired is always a good change for the big players. YouTube for example, they were working in a small crappy office, and being bought out by Google must’ve helped them there. Whether they moved out of there or not is their choice, but they have the option now :P
It should give them freedom to work with less pressure in a nicer environment. With a ton of corporate money behind you can be really live up to your potential, I think.
By Connor Wilson on June 1, 2007 3:06 pm
I have to disagree on the Measure Map example.
While Measure Map stayed stagnant for a while, the MM team was ultimately hard at work designing the new Google Analytics interface (which if you haven’t seen it yet absolutely rocks).
The new GA interface is based a lot on the initial MM design, so it’s easy to see what influence a small team had on a similar product within such a large organization.
So there was a positive outcome from that particular acquisition, even if it wasn’t for the initial product purchased.
By Mike Hickman on June 1, 2007 3:51 pm
I think the whole negative vibe to seeing ones favorite sites/ apps/communities get bought out by bigger companies is that people are afraid of the culture of the company changing. Usually when a bigger company acquires a smaller company, it’s because they’re trying to cash in on the popularity of the company. Most larger companies aren’t acquiring for the long term. This in turn affects the app/site/community. The users can sense when things change (even if nothing really changes) and can tell when the parent company is no longer interested or invested in the long term development of the site/app/community.
By Frank 'viperteq' Young on June 1, 2007 4:53 pm