Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?
Motorola, while it was owned by Google, was actually quite good. The Moto g and the Moto x line were started in that era. The original Moto x was one of the best looking phones I’ve ever used.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker bought the real Casa Bonita and improved everything all around; from the decor and atmosphere, the food and drinks, and pays the staff, IIRC, $32/hour.
It’s not a big conglomerate, but it’s the closest example I could even think of.
That just seems like changing owners.
What is the difference, in your mind, between changing owners and buying out a company?
To me they’re the same thing and this is an appropriate reply for OP. Is it just a matter of scale for you? (I think we’d all like bigger examples, but this still works)
I definitely think the original post meant things like retail stores, social media platforms, nationwide chain restaurants, etc
I think the term the OP used was “faceless conglomorate”.
I heard Matt Stone’s face was ripped off by Scuzzlebutt, and Trey Parker was conglomerated into a dawson’s creek trapper keeper, so seems like a fair answer to me.
BANANA!
Without the many republics and massive damage done we would not have the cheap bananas we all rely on for potassium and low level radiation.
Minecraft maybe? I would say at the minimum it’s a net neutral but considering how far off the deep end Notch is now I imagine it was a good thing.
They’ve made some pretty awful changes to the game since. That being said, I bet minecraft would have fizzled out if microsoft didn’t purchase them. They’re still pumping out regular updates and its popularity is huge. I’d definitely consider the acquisition an overall win.
What awful changes
Accidental delete.
Like forcing everyone over to a microsoft account, which will sneakily force you to hand over your phone number for verification for “suspicious activity” ~1 week after registration, no matter what you do or don’t do.
There was also something about channeling all server chat messages to a central filtering team/system, and irreversibly banning anyone who said something that’s not “child safe”, even if it was just on a private server where the measure was not turned off
I guess the Microsoft account thing I don’t really get, it wasn’t difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff
Idk about the filtering thing, i definitely don’t like it in theory but also haven’t seen anyone actually banned/muted due to it, definitely doesn’t make sense that it’s enabled by default on private servers, should have been a realms only thing, then again a majority of servers with most of the population likely aren’t on realms
I guess the Microsoft account thing I don’t really get, it wasn’t difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff
For new MS accounts they now require a phone number. Not at registration, but in a week after it.
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The game has overall become way too easy. 1.14 villagers completely broke gameplay making trading and building iron farms way too boring. The pre-1.14 mechanics were way more balanced and fun. Raid farms are just way too powerful especially with the nerf to natural spawning that 1.18 brought making witch farms basically unusable. Loads of features like that which just made things too easy. It feels like you’re rewarded too much for very little effort.
Chat reports and microsoft migration are also really controversial, of course.
Not to say that they haven’t made lots of positive changes but that’s my main gripe with the development over the past few years.
I think it’s only easy if you know all the tricks for farming and whatnot, normal players wouldn’t likely say it’s too easy necessarily, I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?
People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.
To be honest though, I can’t really get into vanilla in general, I’m always playing modded if I’m playing myself, tho I watch vanilla players like Hermitcraft
I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?
They entirely overhauled villager trading making it a game of just placing and breaking workstations to get the trades you want. The pre-1.14 mechanics were a lot better and more rewarding imo. Iron golem spawning was also totally overhauled and they’re just too dead simple these days. You can build a 900 ingot per hour farm in about 10 minutes or less.
People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.
I love farming, I’m a technical player so that’s my main focus. I’m saying that the recent changes have really diminished the skill and fun in creating certain farms. Like how portal based farms have been the new meta for basically everything. Just changing it so mobs have a cooldown period after spawning before they can go through portals would be a massive nerf and force people to actually develop cooler farm concepts.
But you’re a different kind of player then the “target” for these kinds of changes right? Think about kids playing Minecraft, you think they’re generally going to be setting up massive raid farms, shulker farms, etc? Probably not, they’d be playing it more “as expected”, which isn’t really “easy” unless you know the cheese farms you can build.
Same kind of thing with storage, there’s tons of storage systems out there that you can use, but majority don’t know about it unless they go out and find the information online.
What’s great about minecraft is that it can be enjoyed by kids but there’s a lot of depth to what you can do as well. No one complained that it was too difficult to make iron farms before the changes. Also kids likely aren’t farming thousands of obsidian blocks to make portal based farms either. There’s a balance that can be made.
I’m not familiar with the detail of that one - was he always a lunatic, or did that come with the money following the buyout?
He always was a weirdo.
I don’t know if it is better than when notch was in charge, but certainly they have updated it more frequently and have taken good care of it, true.
I think it was at its best once Jeb started to take the reins. Notch wasn’t really good at adding features that were actually fun to play with. I liked that they were willing to take risks but that quickly soured as it pairs extremely poorly with their excessive traditionalism. It took like 5 years for them to undo the disastrous combat changes when it became quickly apparent that they sucked, and the hunger/sprinting mechanics are still a pure cancer to the experience to this day. I want to see them make big sweeping changes like in the earlier days while also not being afraid to dial it back or try again if it ends up not being fun.
Bethesda buying Id Software.
GitHub started adding new good features after being acquired by Microsoft
didn’t they like… scrape everyone’s open source code for an ai and then gatekeep that shit to their own infra?
Thats kinda hard to prove though
Mixed feelings on this one; I think the jury is still out. I think I preferred GitHub being independent and focused on hosting source code and reviewing merge requests. But… I’m not sure if the product would’ve ended up any better without being under Microsoft.
Microsoft lately seems to take pretty hands off approaches and follow the “don’t fix what isn’t broken” rule well, which seems to be working for them.
They still behave like a monopoly. Microsoft owning everything is bad for tech even if they can throw money at it and make it “better.” I moved to codeberg.org and it’s been decent.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone’s denying that MS is a shitty company; we’re just talking about companies that have either improved, or haven’t gotten significantly worse, because some other company bought them out.
Not an apple fan really at all but buying that chip design company way back when seems to have been the right move. The M1 chip in my mbp is fantastic.
Victoria’s Secret was started by a businessman who felt like there should be a store for men to buy lingerie for women. It didn’t go so well. The stores were on the verge of bankruptcy and the company was bought out. The new owner marketed the store towards women and it became the largest lingerie retailer in the US.
Less fun fact : the Ceo of victoria secret,who stepped down in 2020 largely due to these allegations, was heavily involved with Epstein, including giving him a free multi million dollar house, and letting him have “hire and firing” rights at victoria secrets to recruit victims by advertising that he was looking for models.
TO;DR:
Luxury items and brands that we don’t really need seem to get better after being bought out. The rest is fucked.
Ducati being bought by Audi. Maintenance intervals got better, instead of doing valve adjustments every 7500 miles. It did make the brand move away from dry clutch to a wet clutch, losing some of their iconic sounds (“I dunno man, should the engine sound like that when idling? Sounds like two metal wrenches hitting each other.”)
Gucci. It got bought out by PPR in the 90’s, they replaced everything but the name pretty much. Tom Ford’s work as the new head designer turned Gucci into the iconic modern luxury brand it is today.
(I only really know this as I was slightly obsessed with that House Of Gucci show with Lady Gaga in it. She’s a fantastic actress.)
Maybe medical? Like, Bio-Ntech designed the COVID vaccine, Pfizer bought it and could wrap up the phase 3 trials and then scale production?
So, they didn’t actually make the product better, but they probably made it viable sooner than if they hadn’t bought it?
But that is kind of the normal process for the medical industry at this point…start ups developing new medicine and then shopping it to Big Pharma for buyouts or funding
Pfizer did not buy BioNtech. They just got a production licence.
Appalachian Mountain Brewery.
They paved the way for new breweries in a little mountain town in western North Carolina. They consistently gave significant percentages to charities, often local. They built a recognized brand and then sold to Anheuser Busch InBev. AB InBev helped them reach new craft beer drinkers with a huge corporate backing. The business ran the same as far as a local consumer could tell. They got a lot of new insight and opportunities.
And then two of the original founders bought it back from AB InBev. First time that’s ever happened. Really great guys too. Very happy to continue to see their journey.
First thing that comes to mind is Lamborghini which would not exist today if it were not acquired. It was on the verge of bankruptcy and ended up getting passed around a few times before being acquired by Volkswagen/Audi. I think the general consensus is that access to Audi’s technology brought some sophistication in the form of AWD, traction and stability control, and a bump in quality and reliability. I know they only make obscenely expensive cars that few people ever get to enjoy, but they were able to maintain a headquarters and factory in Italy with a few thousand employees which would have definitely shut down without the acquisition.
Edit: On the topic of cars, another example would be Red Bull Racing which originated as a small F1 team started in the 90s. It was bought by Ford and rebranded to Jaguar F1. Ford didn’t have much success with it, so they sold the whole team to Red Bull for $1. Red Bull went on to dominate from 2010 to 2013 and again from 2021 to present day.
What was Red Bull racing originally called?
Stewart Grand Prix (Jackie Stewart’s old team), then Jaguar, then Red Bull racing (or a variation thereof).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_Racing
Most teams have a longer list of previous names.
Cool, I didn’t realize teams got taken over in that way, I thought it was a whole new team.
It’s quite fun tracing some of them back - especially the frontrunners which grew put of backmarkers (though often you find the backmarkers were themselves frontrunners 20 years earlie)r.
For example, Tyrrell were world champions with Jackie Stewart in the 70s, but by the mid 1990s, they were pootling around at the back of the field with Ukyo Katayama.
Tyrrell became British American Racing, which became Honda Racing, which became Braun GP, which became Mercedes, who up until Red Bull’s current dominance, were doing pretty well :)
Yeah only Ferrari, McLaren and Williams are still driving under the name it was founded with. Haas could maybe also be counted but it was created by buying up the assets of Manor/Marussia after it collapsed, they technically didn’t buy the Marussia team. I’m not sure if it is a whole new team or if most people working for Marussia just got rehired by Haas.
None that I can think of.
And honestly Brand X is rarely the good guy in this situation being fucked over by the big bad corporations.
It is usually the creator/owner is looking for their payday. They may have created a great product but these days that is usually to make them attractive to be bought out.
In tech, for the last few decades, the goal of so many startups is not to be the next Apple/Google/Facebook but to create something that Apple/Google/Facebook want to buy.
In tech, for the last few decades, the goal of so many startups is not to be the next Apple/Google/Facebook but to create something that Apple/Google/Facebook want to buy.
Yeah unfortunately not taking a buy out often means one of the Big Five making their own version of whatever you’re doing / buying out your competitor, and then bullying you out of the market. A bleak possibility for start ups
