Do acquisitions ever work? Examples? Why? | Hacker News Reader

Do acquisitions ever work? Examples? Why?

9 pointsmethehack15 comments

Do acquisitions ever work? Examples? If you have an example of a success, please feel free to speculate (wildly even) as to why it was successful. I mean this to be a serious question.

[Update: added "Why?" to title]

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A few off the top of my head:

Microsoft:

- Vermeer

- Hotmail

- Visio

- Bungie

Google:

- Pyra

- Urchin

- Applied Semantics

- YouTube

Of course, most of the time they seem to flame out miserably. Microsoft, for instance, took a $6.2bn charge for their Aquantive acquisition. I also once remarked to a couple friends on the Kin team (yes, Kin, remember it?) that Microsoft would've been better off taking $500m in cash to the middle of their soccer fields and lighting it on fire, since at least then it wouldn't have been a huge distraction in the face of launching Windows Phone 7.

Google, of course, has a long history of bungling acquisitions (Jaiku, Dodgeball, etc.), too, but their bigger, more strategic acquisitions seem to have worked out far better than the little ones.

Add Skype to the Microsoft list.

Too soon to tell, I'd say.

Google acquired Urchin (became Google Analytics), YouTube, Android and Applied Semantics (AdSense).

Ebay acquired Paypal and Stubhub.

Twitter acquired Summize (Twitter Search).

Apple acquired PA Semi (designed the core chips used in modern iphone/ipads).

Demanded Media acquired eHow (which is now vastly larger than it was in 2006)

Amazon acquired Zappos.

Microsoft acquired 86-DOS (which became MS-DOS/Windows) and Hotmail.

Lenovo acquired IBM PC Group and in three years went from $3bn revenue to $15bn.

I just thought of this one.

Ebay << Paypal.

I think this is an interesting one, and somehow extra satisfying, because its both a vertical integration and a complementary product.

Most of the examples are just the 3% of the companies acquired in the whole existence of the company. Google bought so many companies that most of them were just talent acquisition.

So far the successful examples seem to me to be in 2 categories:

- a clearly separate product allowed to more or less continue its trajectory, perhaps with some light integration

- in google's case, there are a few examples of a piece of core tech that had a clear application to their core business and a clear integration point

Next acquiring Apple worked pretty well.

Unusually structured deal too :)

Mint

Android

MySpace(I kid)

In case anyone is wondering, here are the acquiring companies:

Quicken << Mint

Conde Nast << Reddit

Google << Android

How has the reddit acquisition worked out for Conde Nast?

Here's a times article on it from 8 months ago:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/business/media/reddit-thri...

The article is mostly about leaving reddit alone. IME, that's always the pitch to the acquired company though: "We love you and we'll leave you alone. We didn't buy you to break you." However, also IME, the acquirer can't help itself. It is what it is. You can see this, for example, in the article when Alexis Ohanian (one of the reddit founders) says "We ran into some annoying human resources bureaucracy when we tried to hire people, but we run lean and don’t make a lot of hires, so that didn’t come up a lot". But what if it had? Hiring practices and processes are a key way, IME, the acquirer completely undermines the acquired company as it can't let go of its hiring practices.

In the article, they also say "Like many digital media companies, it [reddit] has a big audience and minuscule revenue." So its a long term play I guess at least financially.

adsense/adwords?

According to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense#History

ad sense was part of the Applied Semantics acquisition mentioned above.

Adwords, according to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdWords

was done internally once an acquisition attempt for a similar product failed.

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