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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

Right, which makes the condescending tone of "if you don't know this company" even more egregious. They easily could've rephrased that to talk about ironsource's strengths without making a subconscious concession to the fact that 99% of their audience has never heard of this company they are MERGING with, not acquiring.

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I mean, the phrasing might be needlessly contrived, but I fully understood what the company does (despite never having heard the name): Ad service and monetization. Granted, if you're not the type of game/app developer that Unity targets, you might not realize that this type of company even exists or how important they have become in recent years. But the quote perfectly describes what they do without going into unnecessary details.

I suspect that may be because you are familiar with the context.

I now know what they do, thanks to these comments, but that blurb I quoted is almost the Platonic Ideal for "Marketing Dross," and tells me exactly nothing, in many words.

At this point one my argue who Unity writes their blog posts for. But then again if you simply filter out the marketing speech, you'll end up with a pretty good, simplified description:

>If you don’t know ironSource, they bring a proven record of helping creators [...] bringing apps and user experiences to life. ironSource’s suite of tools and solutions provides [...] apps with the monetization, marketing, analytics, and discovery capabilities they need to build and run scalable app-based businesses.

Fair 'nuff, but I've spent most of my adult life, trying to explain fairly arcane technical stuff to non-technical people, so tend to use the vernacular.

I'd probably say something like "IronSource provides infrastructure to help game distributors make money off ads and measure the way their games are used."

Maybe also followed by "And they will make us FREAKIN' RICH!"

Has any merger actually worked out well for the consumer? Boeing / McDonnell Douglas, Chrysler / Daimler, HP / Compaq. Are there any counterexamples?

There are a lot of mergers with B2B sales, not consumer sales, that you don't hear about that have gone perfectly fine.

Apple and NeXT is the only counterexample I can immediately think of.

Good one, thank you!

Apple has made plenty of acquisitions that have improved the product for consumers. PA Semi for example.

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