What’s a company that objectively improved after it got “bought out?”
What’s a company that objectively improved after it got “bought out?”
Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?
Matt Stone and Trey Parker bought the real Casa Bonita and improved everything all around; from the decor and atmosphere, the food and drinks, and pays the staff, IIRC, $32/hour.
It's not a big conglomerate, but it's the closest example I could even think of.
As a Coloradian I’m so ducking happy to see what they’ve done. There was huge issues with the old place and it literally made you sick. Now they have a big time chef and new kitchens
I went there before they bought the place and it was so gross haha. I swear the margaritas were 50% salt and food was microwaved at best. Everyone hyped it up so much and it was just sad. I’ll give it another go if I’m ever in the area again.
Did they change the shows? I remember they had a guy five off the waterfall but that was about it
That just seems like changing owners.
The two combined have about 1.2 billion, which is surely more than the old owners of Casa Bonita.
Minecraft would've died under Notch.
Avoided turning into Meincraft.
Minecraft, not Mein Kampf!
Why explore new chunks? Why raze entire villages? Lebensraum
I agree But for a while he didn't even do anything It was just jeb
And I think it could of worked out But even with all of the dumb stuff Microsoft brought I can't say it was a bad thing
Victoria's Secret was started by a businessman who felt like there should be a store for men to buy lingerie for women. It didn't go so well. The stores were on the verge of bankruptcy and the company was bought out. The new owner marketed the store towards women and it became the largest lingerie retailer in the US.
Less fun fact : the Ceo of victoria secret,who stepped down in 2020 largely due to these allegations, was heavily involved with Epstein, including giving him a free multi million dollar house, and letting him have "hire and firing" rights at victoria secrets to recruit victims by advertising that he was looking for models.
businessman
"Victoria was made up by a dude."
I recently discovered the song by Jax.
It was. Because he felt like a creep buying lingerie for his wife at department stores.
What I find funny is that everything she sings about has nothing to with older men in Ohio, but everything to do with female designers and gay stylists on the coasts.
and then the businessman killed himself
Marketing to women doesn't seem like the secret ingredient to that story.
Out of curiousity, when did this switchover happen?
There was a social media site called MySpace in the early 2000s that got bought out and my friend Tom made out great and is now a successful photographer. The website went to shit, but my first online friend is living his best life.
MySpace actually just reverted back to it's intended purpose which is for bands to post their stuff.
Its true intended purpose was online file storage, a full 300MB for free, which was gigantic at the time.
I had an account there before it died, then Tom bought the domain and made it a social network.
Both halves of that comment are incorrect. It wasn’t originally for posting music, it was an improvement of the concept of social networking that started as an alternative to Friendster.
The music stuff didn’t come until years later, and they never had anything you could consider a success in that department, especially after they deleted every song artists had previously posted to the site.
Also, just going in the website right now, that’s not the bands posting those articles. That’s not even people posting news on MySpace. It is literally just aggregating music news from other websites.
Didn't the whole site shut down? IIRC, everyone who had a MySpace page lost it a few years ago.
I don’t know how to quote, so here y’all go
“There was a social media site called MySpace“
I’ve never felt so old in my life.
Minecraft maybe? I would say at the minimum it's a net neutral but considering how far off the deep end Notch is now I imagine it was a good thing.
I don't know if it is better than when notch was in charge, but certainly they have updated it more frequently and have taken good care of it, true.
I think it was at its best once Jeb started to take the reins. Notch wasn't really good at adding features that were actually fun to play with. I liked that they were willing to take risks but that quickly soured as it pairs extremely poorly with their excessive traditionalism. It took like 5 years for them to undo the disastrous combat changes when it became quickly apparent that they sucked, and the hunger/sprinting mechanics are still a pure cancer to the experience to this day. I want to see them make big sweeping changes like in the earlier days while also not being afraid to dial it back or try again if it ends up not being fun.
First thing that comes to mind is Lamborghini which would not exist today if it were not acquired. It was on the verge of bankruptcy and ended up getting passed around a few times before being acquired by Volkswagen/Audi. I think the general consensus is that access to Audi's technology brought some sophistication in the form of AWD, traction and stability control, and a bump in quality and reliability. I know they only make obscenely expensive cars that few people ever get to enjoy, but they were able to maintain a headquarters and factory in Italy with a few thousand employees which would have definitely shut down without the acquisition.
Edit: On the topic of cars, another example would be Red Bull Racing which originated as a small F1 team started in the 90s. It was bought by Ford and rebranded to Jaguar F1. Ford didn't have much success with it, so they sold the whole team to Red Bull for $1. Red Bull went on to dominate from 2010 to 2013 and again from 2021 to present day.
What was Red Bull racing originally called?
Stewart Grand Prix (Jackie Stewart's old team), then Jaguar, then Red Bull racing (or a variation thereof).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_Racing
Most teams have a longer list of previous names.
IIRC Stewart Grand Prix and then Jaguar Squad. Not an F1 guy though so could definitely be wrong.
Not an apple fan really at all but buying that chip design company way back when seems to have been the right move. The M1 chip in my mbp is fantastic.
Even before that, Apple owes its very existence to an acquisition. Acquiring Next allowed them to abandon their dying OS and start anew with OS X, and brought back in founder Steve Jobs (who Apple had previously fired). With Steve Jobs at the helm, they made the computers cool again to buy some time before the iPod completely turned the company around.
It has some dumb problems though. Lack of dual monitor support and virtualization issues are painful for my users.
I can confirm that dual monitors do work on my M2 Max, with the laptop's own screen I'm at three. I use this setup everyday, no issues.
Ive been running 2 1440p monitors off a M1 Mini since it's launch, one over HDMI and one over DisplayPort via USB C... What're you talking about?
GitHub started adding new good features after being acquired by Microsoft
didn't they like... scrape everyone's open source code for an ai and then gatekeep that shit to their own infra?
Thats kinda hard to prove though
Mixed feelings on this one; I think the jury is still out. I think I preferred GitHub being independent and focused on hosting source code and reviewing merge requests. But... I'm not sure if the product would've ended up any better without being under Microsoft.
Microsoft lately seems to take pretty hands off approaches and follow the "don't fix what isn't broken" rule well, which seems to be working for them.
They still behave like a monopoly. Microsoft owning everything is bad for tech even if they can throw money at it and make it “better.” I moved to codeberg.org and it’s been decent.
And now Azure DevOps has completely been forgotten about. I was setting up an web app in Azure and it gave me the option to do continuous integration from GitHub, but not Azure DevOps.
This one hurts. My team at work currently uses AzDO for our build pipeline. It works pretty well, making it easy to trace which build actually got deployed, plus which git branch and commit got built. The variable substitution feature is pretty slick for test vs. prod builds, too.
You can put together continuous integration with Github Actions, but from what I've seen so far, it seems so much more primitive :(
Here's my full list:
You forgot:
i don't see what you did there
One could make the argument for Disney buying Marvel. They made some great movies. They had also then had enough cash to buy back X-Men, etc and bring everything back in under Marvel Studios. Not a big fan of Marvel stuff lately, but everything up through Endgame was great, especially for a comic nerd like myself.
I enjoyed the story arc leading up to Endgame, but since then, they've filmed so much that I just feel like I can't keep up. The last movie I watched was Multiverse of Madness where I spent about half the movie going "Huh, I feel like I'm missing stuff from the Wanda TV show". I had never seen Spider-Man: No Way Home, either. And I guess there was a Loki show and a Marvel "What If" series, too?
Being a Marvel fan shouldn't have to be a job!
Some stuff hasn't resonated well but there's still some that's been great. Loki, She Hulk, Guardians Xmas, Guardians 3, BP2. I am excited for The Marvels. Shang Chi was meh the first time but on a rewatch after watching some of this other stuff I got more of the connections and enjoyed it more.
True! I enjoyed Loki. Ms Marvel was OK. Shang Chi was fun. Generally though, I feel that things have gotten really watered down and the quality has taken a nosedive. I haven't bothered watching the new Thor or Ant-Man. The Marvels looks great, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm really really hoping that Fantastic 4 is good, and done properly this time (especially Doom).
With Disney buying starwars I didn't like what they did with the sequels but just about everything else they did amazingly
YouTube got better before it got to whatever it is now
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Youtube only existed for less than 2 years as an independent start up. There's no way to know what it could become as an independent tech company.
Volvo has done way better under Geely than they ever have under GM.
Volvo has done way better under Geely than they ever have under
GMFord.Oops, you are right! It is Ford.
From what I heard, Geely bought them and just said "here's a bunch of money, do whatever the fuck you want", and they suddenly started making good stuff.
I wish someone would do that to me, haha
Geely did improve their quality and safety significantly by using Volvo's engineering expertise so it is a win-win for both, and I hope they'll revitalize Proton and Lotus the same way.
This confused me for a second because folks so often call Valve Software, Volvo 😂
We had a local grocery chain get bought out by whole foods (before it was amazon). They went from 80% bullshit homeopathic vitamin shit and 20% old rotting produce to stores with actual (if overpriced) food. I’m sure the local vegans and crystal mommies were sad, but I thought it was a huge improvement.
Any chance that was Wild Oats?
Hahaha yes
Motorola, while it was owned by Google, was actually quite good. The Moto g and the Moto x line were started in that era. The original Moto x was one of the best looking phones I've ever used.
Appalachian Mountain Brewery.
They paved the way for new breweries in a little mountain town in western North Carolina. They consistently gave significant percentages to charities, often local. They built a recognized brand and then sold to Anheuser Busch InBev. AB InBev helped them reach new craft beer drinkers with a huge corporate backing. The business ran the same as far as a local consumer could tell. They got a lot of new insight and opportunities.
And then two of the original founders bought it back from AB InBev. First time that's ever happened. Really great guys too. Very happy to continue to see their journey.
The beer bust is happening. Craft beer isn't the darling it money maker it was a decade ago.
Sounds like this brewery navigated this well and sold high and bought low, but the amount of breweries closing by me is crazy
Where do you live? I'm in Oregon and we probably have 40 breweries in my midsized city. I'm wondering if its just a matter of market saturation where only the strong survive. Funnily enough, I'm currently in Kona, Hawaii on vacation and bought some Kona Brewing Co. beer. Turns out it was brewed and bottled in Portland, Oregon.
OTOH, I find that IPAs are super 'effin saturated and not that great after drinking them over the years. It seems like every brewer wants to jump into IPAs even though you already have 47 choices at every convenience store in the country.
That sounds a lot like Chipotle. Sold to McDonalds, exploded in popularity, and bought themselves back.
Now it's time they sold it back. Those fuckers won't let me order my precious queserito anymore :(
AB InBev does some great stuff with their craft owners. If it made sense for them to buy it back that's awesome, but their mantra around craft really is: "you've got success, we're just going to give you more tools". A lot of the big folks like Duvall operate that way and you wind up with regional breweries shipping kegs around the world.
None that I can think of.
And honestly Brand X is rarely the good guy in this situation being fucked over by the big bad corporations.
It is usually the creator/owner is looking for their payday. They may have created a great product but these days that is usually to make them attractive to be bought out.
In tech, for the last few decades, the goal of so many startups is not to be the next Apple/Google/Facebook but to create something that Apple/Google/Facebook want to buy.
In tech, for the last few decades, the goal of so many startups is not to be the next Apple/Google/Facebook but to create something that Apple/Google/Facebook want to buy.
Yeah unfortunately not taking a buy out often means one of the Big Five making their own version of whatever you're doing / buying out your competitor, and then bullying you out of the market. A bleak possibility for start ups
Good point. I am not knocking the decision to sellout. Just noting that for some it is the goal and for others, as you noted, it is the least worst option.
I just saw a Jaguar that actually looked pretty nice. I hadn't seen a decent Jaguar since Ford bought them out. So I guess Tata did something right in allowing some style back rather than them just looking like a Ford. But I can't vouch for the rest of the car, just that it looked nice, which is something the original Jaguars always had going for them. That unique style.
Saw one in traffic the other day and loved the look but wondered if they still live in the shop these days
Great looks and shit everything else would be super on-brand for Jaguar
You don't like the XJS?
The original is one of my all time favorite car styles. The post-Ford version just looked like a Ford with a mutated Jag frontend stuck on it. The rear shape and lights especially made it literally feel like a Ford sedan ran up the ass of an XJS and the face of the Jag is making an oh shit face. You couldn't tell it was a Jag at all from the rear or sides.
Android being bought by Google
Up to a point, now it feels worse and worse every new version.
I've been feeling lately that Google has lost the plot. Material You is an ugly, inconsistent mess, usability is worse, and you can't expect any feature to stick around because Google is so unreliable.
Android 11 was the last version that felt refined and stable. It was clean, usable, and organized.
You know out of all things i miss the candy names
It seems they still use dessert-based codenames internally. Apprently, Android 13 is Tiramisu, and Android 14 is Upside-Down Cake.
We'd be up to Android "Toffee" with Android "Uncooked Cookie Dough" coming out soon.
🤯 Holy crap how did I not know this! I thought they developed it in house!
I think android 7 was where it peaked with development and features.
It's been jvm dalvik hell since then with Google taking a dump on the Linux kernel.
Perhaps 8 or 9 in my opinion - removing background clipboard access in 10 was a Huge defeature.
I jumped from 8 to 13 on my (new) personal devices, so I missed a lot of firsthand experience, but the clipboard thing still affected me by making apps like Google Translate worse.
13 does seem pretty nice in a lot of ways - notifications are even more capable than they were in 8, for example. But I do notice it being more restrictive in some ways too.
YouTube too. For all the shit we give Google for it, there's no way it could've grown into what it is if it didn't have all that spare cash to burn.
BANANA!
Without the many republics and massive damage done we would not have the cheap bananas we all rely on for potassium and low level radiation.
i really hope you can clarify, are you saying genocide is justifiable to have cheap bananas?
This is a pretty good example of a mental bias. Most of the times this happens it's the expected result, so nobody bothers to remember.
Like I can't remember one either. But there's a lot of companies that have been rescued from disaster and turned back around into forgettable mediocrity. I just ... can't think of one.
Right? The tagline is always something like "new owner will give us the capitol we need to achieve ____ goal," and that makes sense from a business standpoint, but every example I can think of involves the new owner just milking the brand until it collapses.
If you really want to find some, just go look through the holdings of some large holding companies. They didn't make those, they bought them. I'm sure you can find some that were bought at bargain basement prices as more troubled assets and stabilized. Berkshire Hathaway might be a decent place to start.
Ducati being bought by Audi. Maintenance intervals got better, instead of doing valve adjustments every 7500 miles. It did make the brand move away from dry clutch to a wet clutch, losing some of their iconic sounds ("I dunno man, should the engine sound like that when idling? Sounds like two metal wrenches hitting each other.")
The company I work for got bought out and from my perspective things have only improved. From the perspective of the random customer who has the first thing go wrong in half a decade though? Those immediately blame the acquisition.
Gucci. It got bought out by PPR in the 90's, they replaced everything but the name pretty much. Tom Ford's work as the new head designer turned Gucci into the iconic modern luxury brand it is today.
(I only really know this as I was slightly obsessed with that House Of Gucci show with Lady Gaga in it. She's a fantastic actress.)
I was kinda hoping Microsoft would improve Activision.
Someone’s an optimist.
The bar to be an improvement is so obscenely low that it's almost impossible for Microsoft not to be better.
In the development world, Microsoft is actually doing some legitimately good work since the end of the Balmer years. Back then open source was a cancer that needed to be eliminated. Now they have VSCode (maybe the most popular IDE at the moment), develop and release Typescript under an open license, and own github (still a bit of a mixed bag but they're trying).
Narrator: They won't.
Only if Bobby Kotick will be replaced by a real game developer and not a suit.
Supposedly, Kotick is out if Microsoft gets to take over. My assumption was that Microsoft won't wanna keep running the IP into the ground right after acquiring it
Lol
Well they certainly can’t turn it into the worst gaming company because EA still exists.
Its still too soon, isnt it? Like regulators still havent OKd it and stuff yet.
Yeah I think they approved it and are now reexamining it once again.
You can still hope. The acquisition is not complete yet.
Jaguars supposedly got much more reliable after being bought by Ford
My poor friend that is on his 3rd engine begs to disagree.
Well you know what Jaguar stands for, right? Found On Road Dead.
Bethesda buying Id Software.
Maybe medical? Like, Bio-Ntech designed the COVID vaccine, Pfizer bought it and could wrap up the phase 3 trials and then scale production?
So, they didn't actually make the product better, but they probably made it viable sooner than if they hadn't bought it?
But that is kind of the normal process for the medical industry at this point..start ups developing new medicine and then shopping it to Big Pharma for buyouts or funding
Pfizer did not buy BioNtech. They just got a production licence.
Oh interesting! I didn't realize that. I work tangentially with pharma start ups and development and just assumed they were bought out. I've seen that happen enough times that it felt expected. Thanks for the clarification!
I don't think Phizer did anything to make the vaccine better, just more available. Their size makes it possible to do things at larger scale. Phizer has pretty much given up on doing any R&D and now just buys up smaller innovative companies. They extract out any patents and other IP they want, and move on. I work in pharma, and everyone I know who's worked for them in the past has a story about how Pfizer came in, bought their facility, then shut the doors within a couple years. Definitely didn't make the lives of all those workers better, who had to uproot their families and find new jobs elsewhere.
I don't think we should be too surprised by this. If a company isn't all that good before a conglomerate buys it, then it's unlikely to be widely known. Conversely, if a small company is widely known, it's likely to be exceptionally good. So, even if acquisition usually just results in regression to the mean, we'll still mostly have heard of ones that degraded the company.
Mobils shoes got bought by Mephisto and they're amazing shoes now, same as their parent company
Oculus. No way they would have otherwise had the money to make cheap standalone VR headsets like the Quest.
No way would they have forced you to sign up to/in to meta either though.
Everything that has a store requires an account.
- Steam - you need Steam account (also applies to Valve Index then)
- iPhone - you need Apple account
- Android phones - you need Google account
- Oculus before - you needed an Oculus account
The short time during which they required a Facebook account (i.e. an account linked to an unrelated service) was a fuck-up, but they have since reversed that decision. Now it's just a separate standalone VR-related account.
If anything, that is still better than the current Google/Apple situation with their accounts, which link together a bunch of unrelated services (photos, email, payments, storage sync, etc.) in an inseparable way.