the list goes on and on. A lot of these products would not be where they are today (nor shuttered necessarily) without the resources (or lackthereof) poured into them after acquisition. Yahoo tried and failed miserably in its end.
Facebook may be the best example on that list. They get beat to mobile messenging, they buy Beluga. They lose screen time to mobile devices, they buy Snaptu. They get beat again to mobile (camera/photo album), they buy Instagram. The get beat by in messenging AGAIN, and they buy WhatsApp. They get beat to video by youtube, they buy LiveRail. In a panic to not be beat again they buy Occulus.
Plus, in this case they are mostly buying the Reputation and Service Contracts, not as much the product. IBM is already mostly a Service, not product, company now.
Google is a great example too. Many of Google’s best-known hits began outside of Google:
* Maps (maps from Where2 Technologies, acquired in 2004; real-time traffic from ZipDash, acquired in 2004; satellite imagery from Keyhole, acquired in 2005)
* Android (founded in 2003, bought for $50M+ in 2005)
* YouTube (founded in 2005, bought for $1.7B in 2006)
* Adsense (Google acquired Applied Semantics in 2003,
DoubleClick in 2007, and AdMob for mobile ads in 2009)
* Google Docs (spreadsheets by 2Web, acquired in 2005; docs by Upstartle, acquired in 2006; slides by Tonic Systems, acquired in 2007)
Great comment. Thanks for sharing all of this knowledge.
> They loose screen time to mobile devices, they buy Snaptu.
This was acquisition for feature phones and not touch phones. Your comment implies that Facebook mobile app came out of this acquisition - which is not true.
Microsoft - PowerPoint, Hotmail, FrontPage, Windows Live Messenger, Visio, Bungie, Rare, Lionhead, Mojang, Dynamics (Great Plains, NAV), Skype, Defender, Perceptive Pixel (Surface Hubs), Yammer, LinkedIn, Acompli (Outlook Mobile), GitHub, Xamarin, Beam (Mixer)
Facebook - Beluga (Messenger app), Snaptu (Facebook for Every Phone, Facebook Lite), Instagram, Atlas, Parse, WhatsApp, Occulus, LiveRail (video monitization)
Adobe - PageMaker, After Effects, Photoshop, FrameMaker, GoLive, Audition, Echosign (Adobe Sign), Macromedia (who itself acquired Freehand, Dreamweaver, Flash, ColdFusion), Fireworks, plus its entire Marketing Cloud: Omniture, Day, Auditude, Neolane, Livefyre, TubeMogul, Magento, Marketo etc
Oracle - ...
the list goes on and on. A lot of these products would not be where they are today (nor shuttered necessarily) without the resources (or lackthereof) poured into them after acquisition. Yahoo tried and failed miserably in its end.
Facebook may be the best example on that list. They get beat to mobile messenging, they buy Beluga. They lose screen time to mobile devices, they buy Snaptu. They get beat again to mobile (camera/photo album), they buy Instagram. The get beat by in messenging AGAIN, and they buy WhatsApp. They get beat to video by youtube, they buy LiveRail. In a panic to not be beat again they buy Occulus.
Plus, in this case they are mostly buying the Reputation and Service Contracts, not as much the product. IBM is already mostly a Service, not product, company now.