For consumers? no. Google is pretty happy with all its ad acquisitions, all those companies are dead and there is no competition. Oracle is pretty happy with its patent trolling from its acquisitions. Game companies are pretty happy with their small company buys where they produce garbage sequels and everyone buys it.
to be fair, lack of acquisitions often go stupidly bad too.
digg refused to sell to multiple companies, ultimately turning down a $200m offer, only to do their next funding round only at $175m, and then they promptly collapsed.
groupon refused to sell to google for $6b and a few short years later wasn't worth shit. hell, groupon's collapsed was so bad the shock waves killed livingsocial and daily deal offerings from both google and amazon.
Was there an acquisition in the history of ever that worked out well?
For consumers? no. Google is pretty happy with all its ad acquisitions, all those companies are dead and there is no competition. Oracle is pretty happy with its patent trolling from its acquisitions. Game companies are pretty happy with their small company buys where they produce garbage sequels and everyone buys it.
Conglomerates just keep getting bigger
Not for Microsoft.
Skype was a colossal failure. Rare never gets used.
Skype was acquired to make Teams. Microsoft Office was always more valuable than Skype.
Zoom absolutely killed Skype, rolling it into Teams was purely to save some returns on their investment.
They rolled out teams before zoom caught on during lockdowns
zoom only took off because it's owned by china and they got favorable treatment.
there were dozens of other major players in the space, and google meet does literally everything zoom does, even voice calls into big meetings.
I believe Teams is something corps actually pay for. I've seen it used at work several places.
Zoom is more popular among the free crowd...
I prefer skype, whatever zoom does to audio it reminds me of those "play it backwards and sounds like the devil" kind of things.
zoom has no security.
Powerpoint, Visio and Hotmail were all successful acquisitions for Microsoft, and GitHub and LinkedIn may still prove to be.
They had Minecraft. I think that turned a profit for them.
Enix getting bought by Squaresoft turned out ok.
blizzard didnt ruin candy crush... afaik
to be fair, lack of acquisitions often go stupidly bad too.
digg refused to sell to multiple companies, ultimately turning down a $200m offer, only to do their next funding round only at $175m, and then they promptly collapsed.
groupon refused to sell to google for $6b and a few short years later wasn't worth shit. hell, groupon's collapsed was so bad the shock waves killed livingsocial and daily deal offerings from both google and amazon.
Google got ahold of YouTube for a pretty cheap price.