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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Can anybody name a successful autodesk acquisition? Their record seems quite embarrassing, filled with lots of acquisitions of unrelated tech for inflated prices that they ultimately shut down.

(No offense meant to the companies being acquired, they’re usually great. Autodesk is the one who seems to screw everything up.)

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It's extremely hard for large companies acquiring smaller ones to do it well.

Kind of interesting to look through these and wonder what (if anything) survived:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electr...

I'm still impressed that Java appears to be getting better faster under Oracle than it did in the Sun days. I mean, Oracle! How?

Java and its ecosystem is a cash cow. Any company will be happy to tend to a cash cow

Something that many keep forgeting with their Oracle hate, is that Oracle has been part of the Java eco-system since the early days.

They did the NC Java station alongside Sun, were the first RDMS to support Java stored procedures, ported their installers and GUI tooling to Java, created their own JVM, later bought BEA, and created their own JEE implementation, among other Java frameworks.

Didn't they get rid of everything that didn't bring profit like JEE and NetBeans? The only part of Java that Oracle cares about is paid(supported)LTS versions, as there is no free LTS version anymore, with new quick release schedule. Well, that was the idea, some companies like Amazon ( https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/ ) want to backport fixes.

Their acquisition of Alias in 2006 was good, wasn’t it? That’s how Autodesk ended up as the owners of Maya, MotionBuilder, the FBX file format and a few other things.

They acquired Cadsoft Eagle, and I think they continue to develop it. I don't know if it was a successful acquisition though

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