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The usual play is to acquire the customers and brand, with the team as a bonus.

Except for rare unique products, the source code might not matter at all. They're after the business, brand, and customers.

Having been in acquired SmallCos a couple times: There are always plans and justifications involving the products being acquired, but most don't survive impact with the acquiring company. People in a BigCo have their little fiefdoms established and everyone resists the sudden appearance of new developers and new code that weren't under their control. To be fair it goes both ways and the SmallCo developers who were previously in charge of everything don't like giving up control of parts of the system to the established teams and procedures in the BigCo.

> when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after

There's many reasons, but in general incompetence, malice and small crumbs problem.

I've done my small share of M&A DD work as an engineer, which was a lot of fun, but the results on my sanity and my outlook was bad.

On one hand, you get to go talk to a core founder of a company and they're entirely open to you picking their brain on "Why this" / "Did it pay off?" on pure eV math they did in their heads.

On the other, you see what happens after your recommendation and it is not within your control to change any of it.

Incompetence is generally "Please rewrite this software by our practices" devops hell or "Let's look for better customers for this product, ignore the old ones" in the ICP land. Google and dodgeball comes to mind.

Malice is more clear cut, where "Let's buy it and shut it down, so that we don't have a threat to our business" - I'm eagerly waiting to see what happens with Groq and Nvidia for example. AWS buying Groq would've been massively different. Classic case in point is Apple buying Fingerworks & shutting it down, but launching the iPhone.

Lastly, there's the small crumbs problem (or as it has been famously said "Do not anthropomorphize the lawn mower").

A company can get bought and the product doesn't really add great value to the buyer, beyond getting a few people who really know the space. The small number of people them gets redistributed into a neat set of existing reqs where they just accelerate the existing company's products based on that knowledge or in general fail to surface back to make a significant ripple in the future.

For example, I am wondering what will happen to Promptfoo after OpenAI.

It's because BigCo's tend toward decisions with dumb outcomes, while SmallCo's still benefit from the strategic direction of their founders. Although not a hard and fast rule, if you take a good look at where innovation occurs you'll often find the most successful products of big tech companies (after the initial one that made them big in the first place) came from acquisitions. Just look at Google's case: Android, YouTube, Maps, etc.

Sometimes the aquisition doesn't pan out as planned, or they were just after the talent or to snuff out a potential competitor / snag its customers (like Postini), or it was a dumb move in the first place and the numbers finally bore that out. BigCo's don't usually have the same determined, long-term dedication to their acquisitions as the people who the founded them, so you also see premature shedding of ventures that could have a ton of potential over time.

Source code is only useful when you want the actual product, which is the rare case. Most of the time they want the patents, naming rights or just customers.

This was during the dotcom bubble and AOL/Time Warner need to optically look like they were doing something relevant with the internet to justify their valuation. It was pure messaging, with a bit of killing a threat on the side.

It's how The System kills something it wants dead without triggering Streisand Effect and creating a huge backlash. It punishes with success.

It could just be a failed acquisition but an variant sometimes happens. OpenAI bought Statsig and then sold the Statsig brand and customer base to Amplitude.

Not complicated. Thing shows banner ads. Only makes money when expenses are zero.

sometimes it's an acquisition of some product and sometimes it's to explicitly to kill off the thing without concern for any product.

Eh, I think that does happen but is much less likely then either acquihiring or killing a potential competitor.

The want the: developers, IP, customers, to kill some competition, or some combination.

they want a popular thing, then that thing falls under the control of Big Business Meeting Thinking , and suffers the expected fate

Not a "company" but the SQLite story gives me maverick vibes.

https://sqlite.org/consortium.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSVgeMoXJTs

A community version survives to this day:

https://getwacup.com/

it really does that llama thing