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Comment by jasonwatkinspdx | Hacker News Reader

It gets worse. There are plenty of examples of where a company in a dominant market position with ample cash to work with used bully lawsuits to bankrupt an emerging competitor, then bought them in receivership only to kill the company in total the next instant. For me personally the salient example is what Creative did to Aureal, because what happened is particularly clear cut. I'm not joking when I say the Aureal drivers and support website went offline the very day the bankruptcy acquisition committed.

Likewise, there are some pretty infamous examples of the giants doing this crap to each other, like this one: https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html

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I used to work for Fanatics.com. Together with UnderArmor, they outbid Majestic for the MLB jersey contract. Majestic had had the contract since the 70s.

Majestic immediately filed for bankruptcy. Which was good news for UnderArmor and Fanatics, because they didn’t have any ability to make baseball jerseys. So they bought Majestic for a dime on the dollar since it was bankrupt.

Thanks for sharing such a great example.

I don't know quite how to estimate the scale of how much of this is going on, but I think it's pretty clear society in bulk is relatively blind to this family of tactics, or to use PR terms, inoculated against reacting to it.

In this case tou could argue that Majestic was poorly managed, given that it apparently survived on a single contract.

There are plenty of mid sized business that depend on an anchor client. Obviously that's not a great long term situation.

But it doesn't really distract from the particular dynamic we've been talking about in this subthread, which is a more aggressive and predatory version of competition that captures the deal then uses the courts to capture the already invested capital infrastructure from the side that lost the deal. This sort of tactic is enabled more by people who can market to investors via manufactured signals vs the idealized lassie faire market reality of the transaction.

I'm not pretending this is a trivial problem to solve, but I think it is very much a real problem, and the "they were fools and the market simply beat them" narratives fail to capture what's really going on here imo.

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