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?
YouTube got better before it got to whatever it is now
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Youtube only existed for less than 2 years as an independent start up. There’s no way to know what it could become as an independent tech company.
Certainly not rich enough to host the amount of content it does, or pay content creators what they get paid.
The original plan was a dating site with video profiles!
What could have been…instead we got tinder :/
Bethesda buying Id Software.
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
Good point. I am not knocking the decision to sellout. Just noting that for some it is the goal and for others, as you noted, it is the least worst option.
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.
Volvo has done way better under Geely than they ever have under GM.
Volvo has done way better under Geely than they ever have under
GMFord.From what I heard, Geely bought them and just said “here’s a bunch of money, do whatever the fuck you want”, and they suddenly started making good stuff.
I wish someone would do that to me, haha
Geely did improve their quality and safety significantly by using Volvo’s engineering expertise so it is a win-win for both, and I hope they’ll revitalize Proton and Lotus the same way.
This confused me for a second because folks so often call Valve Software, Volvo 😂
One could make the argument for Disney buying Marvel. They made some great movies. They had also then had enough cash to buy back X-Men, etc and bring everything back in under Marvel Studios. Not a big fan of Marvel stuff lately, but everything up through Endgame was great, especially for a comic nerd like myself.
Some stuff hasn’t resonated well but there’s still some that’s been great. Loki, She Hulk, Guardians Xmas, Guardians 3, BP2. I am excited for The Marvels. Shang Chi was meh the first time but on a rewatch after watching some of this other stuff I got more of the connections and enjoyed it more.
True! I enjoyed Loki. Ms Marvel was OK. Shang Chi was fun. Generally though, I feel that things have gotten really watered down and the quality has taken a nosedive. I haven’t bothered watching the new Thor or Ant-Man. The Marvels looks great, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m really really hoping that Fantastic 4 is good, and done properly this time (especially Doom).
Quantumania got a bad rap, but I actually enjoyed it. It was pretty CG heavy and that detracted from it a bit, but it was still fun and an interesting episode to start what ever season we’re up to now.
I really enjoyed it. I’m not sure why it got so much hate.
I liked it too but it is very obviously a bad BAD BAD movie.
I apparently go against the flow. I didn’t like Avengers: Endgame (I only watched it to find out what happens) and, while we’re at it, I didn’t like Rogue One either.
I fucking despise Rogue One and would rather sit through Jar-Jar Binks singing Bohemian Rhapsody through the duration of the entire song than to have to sit and watch that monstrosity of a movie again.
I do not want to watch some poor girl get told off, put down, and kicked down by everyone else around her simply because she was a sacrificial lamb for the overarching plot and everyone else knew it but her. And that’s all Rogue One was.
Modok was terrible but the overall movie was alright imho
F4 has such high expectations I don’t think it can be done properly.
I thought Krasinski was a good Mr. Fantastic in Dr Strange 3, so we’ll see where they take it.
I didn’t dislike Krasinski in Dr Strange 2 but I wasn’t fully sold on him. He was fine for a cameo, but I don’t think he’d pull off the character in a lead role. Mr Fantastic - or at least my interpretation of him - has always been arrogant, aloof and disconnected. It’s clear he thinks he’s the smartest person in the room (because he is, and probably the planet), and he’s not necessarily a cold person but it’s obvious he focuses more on his work than on the people around him, even if he does care about them. Krasinski just never sold me on being the smartest person on the planet, not did he really nail the slightly disconnected aspect of the character, I feel.
It’s perhaps a slightly weird suggestion, but I’ve always felt that Glenn Howerton (Dennis from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia) would be my ideal Mr Fantastic. He can absolutely pull of that arrogant, slightly narcissistic aspect of the character, but I feel like he can do it in a charismatic, likeable way. And he can definitely sell the idea that he’s very intelligent. Plus he looks the part.
Agreed. They should keep him in the role. He’s the fan favorite.
I’m sorry, but She Hulk? Loki was whatever, the Xmas special and BP2 were fine and Guardians 3 was amazing, but really?
Sorry, I know it’s just an opinion but I got severe whiplash seeing that title up there.
Yep She Hulk was one of my favorites, probably the funniest of the marvel TV shows. The ending was weird but I loved everything else about it.
Every day I’m on this Earth, the sheer breadth of human diversity (especially when it comes to thoughts and opinions) continues to astound me.
“Great” meaning great gigantic messes of nonsensical fanservice and a flood of movies and shows all tied to each other so if you miss one episode of Obscure Marvel Kerfuffle Re-re-revisited you’ll be lost.
You know, like fucking Star Wars is now.
Disney is fucking evil. Fuck Disney.
My dude… the plot lines in comic books were so convoluted that the writers literally came up with an in canon catastrophe to clean up the timeline by collapsing countless alternate universes. Superhero movies being tied to each other and having a convulted mess of a plot that makes you feel lost if you miss “obscure marvel kerfluffle 3 wrath of the plot device” is very on brand for comics based media.
And that’s where comic books went to shit, too. Do kids these days really have no real arguments for anything besides citing even more bullshit to support their bullshit?
- old man yells at comic book
Disney is literally racist, sexist, homophobic… Etc. You name it. They cave to China for money every time, even if it’s shrinking or even removing black people from their posters
Were you around when “The Secret War” series came out in the comics? The plot line ran through every single title in the Marvel catalog. Just keeping up with Spiderman required reading four issues. That strategy of story telling wasn’t invented by Disney.
I like it. It’s better than every story being inconsistent. I haven’t watched all the marvel stuff and don’t feel like I missed much really.
They didn’t have to copy it, now did they? Just because something was shit before something else was shit isn’t a fucking excuse.
As others have said, something being stupid in the past doesn’t excuse it being stupid now. And hey, I’d get it if we were still dealing with a couple movies a year, but now it’s a flood of content that nobody can keep up with unless Marvel is their only hobby.
With Disney buying starwars I didn’t like what they did with the sequels but just about everything else they did amazingly
Jaguars supposedly got much more reliable after being bought by Ford
My poor friend that is on his 3rd engine begs to disagree.
Well you know what Jaguar stands for, right? Found On Road Dead.
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Nope. Jaguars were absolute trash before Ford bought them out back in the day, then got a lot more reliable (but arguably uglier, so as not to compete with Aston Martin) when built with Ford stuff. Tata purchased them semi-recently and they’ve gotten even better.
This is a pretty good example of a mental bias. Most of the times this happens it’s the expected result, so nobody bothers to remember.
Like I can’t remember one either. But there’s a lot of companies that have been rescued from disaster and turned back around into forgettable mediocrity. I just … can’t think of one.
Right? The tagline is always something like “new owner will give us the capitol we need to achieve ____ goal,” and that makes sense from a business standpoint, but every example I can think of involves the new owner just milking the brand until it collapses.
If you really want to find some, just go look through the holdings of some large holding companies. They didn’t make those, they bought them. I’m sure you can find some that were bought at bargain basement prices as more troubled assets and stabilized. Berkshire Hathaway might be a decent place to start.
There was a social media site called MySpace in the early 2000s that got bought out and my friend Tom made out great and is now a successful photographer. The website went to shit, but my first online friend is living his best life.
I don’t know how to quote, so here y’all go
“There was a social media site called MySpace“
I’ve never felt so old in my life.
MySpace actually just reverted back to it’s intended purpose which is for bands to post their stuff.
Its true intended purpose was online file storage, a full 300MB for free, which was gigantic at the time.
I had an account there before it died, then Tom bought the domain and made it a social network.
Didn’t the whole site shut down? IIRC, everyone who had a MySpace page lost it a few years ago.
Both halves of that comment are incorrect. It wasn’t originally for posting music, it was an improvement of the concept of social networking that started as an alternative to Friendster.
The music stuff didn’t come until years later, and they never had anything you could consider a success in that department, especially after they deleted every song artists had previously posted to the site.
Also, just going in the website right now, that’s not the bands posting those articles. That’s not even people posting news on MySpace. It is literally just aggregating music news from other websites.
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.”)
TO;DR:
Luxury items and brands that we don’t really need seem to get better after being bought out. The rest is fucked.
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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 hard to start a new team from scratch, and there’s pretty much always some team that’s struggling at the back, so usually it’s done this way. Andretti is trying to start one from scratch tho.
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.
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 :)
IIRC Stewart Grand Prix and then Jaguar Squad. Not an F1 guy though so could definitely be wrong.
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.
i really hope you can clarify, are you saying genocide is justifiable to have cheap bananas?
I think it’s sarcasm, mate, but I could be wrong
I think he thinks “BANANA” is a company.
It is a dig on all banana companies as I don’t know any that operate today with clean hands.
If someone can name a non villain banana producer I would like that.
Miami Fruit is expensive but they haven’t committed any crimes against humanity that I’m aware of. They had lots of varieties last time I ordered but it’s been a while.
Miami Fruit
Neat, did not think I would be reading about something good in Florida today. Thanks!
I do enjoy a BANANA brand banana
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I feel my hate for bananas is justified by such behavior.
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Is it? AMD’s first idea was to put a GPU in the same package as the CPU, and then you buy a discreet GPU and crossfire the two together. That didn’t work and it was quickly abandoned.
Then AMD releases Faildozer around the same time Intel gets their shit in order with Core. The company gets incredibly cash strapped and very nearly falls apart. The CPU side eventually got it together, but the GPU side seems to be crawling out from that nightmare only recently.
Edit: it also killed their relationship with Nvidia. Back then on AMD systems, the memory controller was on the north bridge chipset, which meant your choice of motherboard could have a dramatic effect on performance. The nForce chipset line was the best one. Buying ATI meant nothing like that would happen again.
The GPU side admittedly was what kept the CPU side from just imploding. Bulldozer was really really awful.
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This was going to be my first answer. I had a boycott of ATI due to horrible driver support on Linux.
And now it’s just horrible drivers for windows.
/S? … a 5700xt owner.
What GPU doesn’t have horrible drivers?
I just saw a Jaguar that actually looked pretty nice. I hadn’t seen a decent Jaguar since Ford bought them out. So I guess Tata did something right in allowing some style back rather than them just looking like a Ford. But I can’t vouch for the rest of the car, just that it looked nice, which is something the original Jaguars always had going for them. That unique style.
You don’t like the XJS?
The original is one of my all time favorite car styles. The post-Ford version just looked like a Ford with a mutated Jag frontend stuck on it. The rear shape and lights especially made it literally feel like a Ford sedan ran up the ass of an XJS and the face of the Jag is making an oh shit face. You couldn’t tell it was a Jag at all from the rear or sides.
Ah OK I was mistaken and under the impression that it was originally created under Ford ownership, but it actually stems from the British Leyland era.
However the XJR-15 and XJ220 were under Ford, and look sensational. (Although most of the development was probably done while Jag was still independent).
Great looks and shit everything else would be super on-brand for Jaguar
Saw one in traffic the other day and loved the look but wondered if they still live in the shop these days
