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dzonga

one thing I applaud MS for, even though I hate the OS they forced on the world:

being able to grow revenues from acquired companies.

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For every success story (Mojang) there are 3-4 horror stories (Fast, Yammer, Nokia, aQuantive, etc.)

I do feel like some of those companies were doomed before microsoft was involved at least

Is aQuantive still around? Atlas was sold to Facebook in 2013, and re-released in 2014.

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/09/23/facebook-to-introduce-new-ad...

Not as a entity. MS broke it up and sold off all the parts. Razorfish is still sort of around: https://www.razorfish.com/

I think Razorfish was spun out before the acquisition.

Skype

As ex-Nokia, on that case they did it to themselves.

First for the kind of management we had regarding Symbian vs Linux, angering the Symbian developer community, always changing the development stack, deciding to bring a Microsoft person which decided to go all in on Windows Phone, when the R&D culture was pretty much anti-MS during those days (Symbian/Linux), and having a contract clause for a nice bonus if Elop managed to sell the company.

> being able to grow revenues from acquired companies.

correction:

being able to inflate and cover up their losses by acquiring already successful companies

Doesn’t matter what you call it, the system works apparently. Not many companies can say that.

It is important when you want to draw conclusions; you should use factual data, not your emotions

Your response appears to be much more emotionally driven than articbull’s. He is simply acknowledging their business model and the fact it is clearly a system that works, you’re assigning it some kind of value.

I read it again and i can see that, you are right, that wasn't the intent, i felt the comment was trying to downplay losses, so i felt the need to remind the differences, even more so since they just announced laying off 10k employees, including destroying the entire AR/VR/MR team

Yeah sorry I didn't mean it to come across that way!

I see their core business as changing, and they're being resourceful in leveraging acquisitions to continue to deliver shareholder value into the future.

I think this is a strategy that many companies have historically executed on very badly.

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