Meraki and OpenDNS both became better post acquisition, and in both cases I’d say it was because Cisco let them continue to maintain a lot of control, the leaders stayed around, and the majority of the engineering teams did, too. Cisco has a long list of successful acquisitions. The release says Gary will report to Chuck directly, which is a strong sign Chuck will make sure Splunk succeeds. (nb, I was CEO of OpenDNS)
Like you said, Meraki got better because the core team, including engineering and sales as well as the founders, stuck around for about two years. Things did go significantly downhill once the founders left but by that point the company was already so successful that the exodus of great people that followed their departure probably didn't even impact their bottom line that much. I will say that I personally found working for a Cisco subsidiary pretty terrible relative to working for a startup but, hey, the checks cleared.
AppD offers some SIEM. Splunk does much more than SIEM. Splunk Observability Cloud has nothing to do with Splunk Enterprise, it's a fully fledged AppD competitor.
> Oh, wow, they even acquired Intel smartphone modem business at 2019 and other Semiconductor businesses.
Was the easiest way to put some fire under Qualcomm's arse, RF modems, batteries and displays are the only things Apple doesn't have under their direct control - but for batteries and displays they at least have a selection of competing suppliers. With modems, they're stuck at whatever crap Qualcomm delivers.
Apple Weather may be better, but DarkSky is gone and it has not included all the features it used to have, such as hourly rain probability for any day.
From my perspective as an Apple Weather user, it went from basic and barebones to feature-packed almost overnight.
The cost also went down. DarkSky was $4. I wasn't ever willing to pay for a weather app.
I see hourly rain predictability for today, and for future days there are hourly precipitation charts in inches. I can't imagine that precipitation beyond the current day on an hourly basis has any chance of being accurate.
I think alternative weather apps like DarkSky were incentivized to provide extra information that justifies their existence regardless of accuracy/precision.
E.g., if I make my own weather app and my selling point is that I give you a forecast for every 10 minutes or that my forecast goes out 5 years, I don't have to have any shred of accuracy because it's just a forecast. I was able to sell you my app because you're impressed by the fact that I give you more granular predictions.
> The cost also went down. DarkSky was $4. I wasn't ever willing to pay for a weather app.
I was the same way. Then I broke down and paid the $5. Best app purchase I ever made. One time fee and used it for years. I wish there were more apps like this.
Oddly enough this is the one reason why I don't use Apple Weather. I live in Texas - if you don't have covered parking you will inevitably get hail damage. The 1-2 days per week I go into the office I have to check Accuweather beforehand.
Precipitation probability is the most important thing in a weather app to me.
You can set up alerts with windy.com to be notified about a location have a forecast combination of wind and rain that may work well for forecasting hail.
Apple Weather is better, but not as good as DarkSky. And DarkSky is gone.
It’s one of the few apps I bought and it’s frustrating that Apple bought them, picked a few features, killed the rest, and shut everything down.
I’m not even complaining about killing the api, that makes sense since Apple doesn’t care about this.
But Apple Weather’s maps don’t work as well, the precipitation views aren’t as detailed, the user supplied precipitation reports are gone. It just does different things.
But, yes, Apple Weather is now a better app because the acquisition.
Webex is much better under Cisco than it was on it's own. Cisco's expertise in hardware made for a great combination and has kept the product aligned with interoperable standards more than Zoom and some of the others.
The responses here are giving me some hope. I’ve just had many experiences as a customer where products I’ve used became worse (or were shut down) after their companies were acquired
There are exception, but Microsoft seems pretty good at this. GitHub, Minecraft... Skype got a lot better for me in terms of reliability after the acquisition too, of course they've been competed away by other voips like Facetime and Whatsapp these days.
LinkedIn is better than ever for finding a job, or advertising a job, even though lots of people here don't like it because of the LinkedIn poasting culture.
Is so much worse under Microsoft. As a parent, it’s funny how much Microsoft hate is in the house because the Minecraft fuckery. They made new versions, migrated accounts, added micro purchases, made mods harder.
My 5-year-old had a Mojang account and could download and install Minecraft. Migrating to a Microsoft account was very hard and took multiple attempts and my direct help. And for some reasons “sucks.”
Companies rarely buy other companies in order to make buyee's product better, they buy them to boost the buyer's business or at least remove competition.
They don't buy in order to make the buyee's product better, but continuing to improve the product may be necessary to realise the value of the purchase particularly if regular updates and improvements are a big reason that customers stay with the brand.
It may, or it may not. (Cue Apple buying a CNC laser cutter manufacturer just to get hold of the inventory).
When a company is deemed a good investment it's invested into by financiers, actual companies often buy other companies for other means than developing them further.
Why YouTube? It was definitely worse pre-acquisition, but so did the rest of the internet. Do you think it could've gone under without Google's capital?
