For Microsoft, acquisitions aren’t about creating value, they’re about destroying the competition.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish.
Also a shitty tactic, but something different entirely
There is a fundamental fallacy by many who think that a large business got large by being the best within its field, but the truth is purely that those big business are biggest because they are the canibals who focused on eating the smaller better businesses rather than minding their own.
By eating/sacrificing other business, even viable ones, they prolong their selves despite producing no actual value - so you just have a bunch of cool businesses being consumed within the belly of the beast, while thousands of talented high skill creatives get shackled to a desk with golden handcuffs and are tasked with churning and looking busy
This is not the best system for our resources or creativity, and yet here we are regardless.
This implies an awful lot of opportunity to make an awful lot of money anywhere we have an under performing big business. Or at the very least a cheap way to improve services for everyone for a long while (forcing the big guy to subsidize in order to stick around).
Shame so few take the opportunity.
The problem with that is you either allow yourself to get bought out or you get priced out of existence.
I’m confused by your post. Getting priced out of existence is great for consumers. Literally having your goods paid for by Bezos. This is what I mentioned above: you can extract money from Bezos for you by making him buy the company, and you can extract money from Bezos for everyone by making him price you out for awhile. So just do this on loop for the benefit of all?
Why can’t, say, the democratic socialists pop up a moderately competent diaper company to force Bezos to do it again? Slightly increase dues to keep the competitor alive for awhile, and enjoy a big-business subsidy for all.
It would take billions to get millions out of these people assuming they weren’t already wise to it and you weren’t stopped by the republican controlled FTC or other agency. Also you would be asking people to work for a company with a guaranteed lack of upward mobility and job security, not to mention no ability to accrue retirement.
I’m not convinced that Pillows .com was a money-loser, considering its ability to grow and reasonable sale price. Do you know where the total spent by amazon vs spent in Pillow tallys can be found?
And if there was a profit/net outlay from Bezos, then we can use that for employee benefits. It’s unusual to have a corporate pension in the US; folks still have a stock-market retirement plan. Plus, as soon as Bezos buys your Pillow corp, you’ll be starting another (or something similar) soon…
Often need VC money. VCs often want to exit as quick as possible, which usually means getting bought out by large companies. Large companies often have quite a big “moat” with sky high barrier to entry. A startup is not going to be able to build a logistics network like Amazon’s, for example. VCs are not in the business of competing; that’s not what they want to hear when looking for companies to invest in.
Surely some rich person benefits from Bezos bleeding? (Though my favorite variant of this remains some other large nonprofit moving into the space. Ideally using a non-VC revenue stream.)
They are the original vibe coders, someone else has a good idea? either copy it or buy them out. Don’t think they’ve come up with an original idea in 30 years
The bag of money the shareholders got is the benefit. That’s why they sold, nobody at Zenimax involved in the acquisition thought MS was going to take the company to a higher level.
i truly do not understand why developers who started out working for themselves wouldn’t form a cooperative, it’s a pretty unique opportunity to make sure you don’t get exploited.
It had been at least 20 min since I’d had a reason do despise Microsoft.
