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?
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.
As a Coloradian I’m so ducking happy to see what they’ve done. There was huge issues with the old place and it literally made you sick. Now they have a big time chef and new kitchens
I went there before they bought the place and it was so gross haha. I swear the margaritas were 50% salt and food was microwaved at best. Everyone hyped it up so much and it was just sad. I’ll give it another go if I’m ever in the area again.
Did they change the shows? I remember they had a guy five off the waterfall but that was about it
They kept a lot of the shows. I don’t know which ones stayed since it’s a lotto system to get in and we’ve been on the list since May.
Did they change the shows? I remember they had a guy five off the waterfall but that was about it
Consider yourself lucky. I had to drive all the way to Tijuana for the opportunity to see a guy five off a waterfall show.
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.
Sure, but that was just additional context for my question, which was what this poster feels is the difference between changing owners and buying out a company.
They’re thinking of changing owners vs buying a corporate company with a CEO. Yeah they’re similar lol but not really what the post is asking for on here
Again with the fixation on the OP. Let me be more direct: I didn’t ask you.
The context provided in the question is of big companies buying smaller companies and ruining them. OP asked if “the opposite ever happens”, which I interpret to mean a big corporation buying a smaller company and it NOT going to shit.
Sure we can talk about any change in ownership whatsoever, but that seems like a complete change in topic with an obvious answer.
The two combined have about 1.2 billion, which is surely more than the old owners of Casa Bonita.
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.
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businessman
“Victoria was made up by a dude.”
I recently discovered the song by Jax.
It was. Because he felt like a creep buying lingerie for his wife at department stores.
What I find funny is that everything she sings about has nothing to with older men in Ohio, but everything to do with female designers and gay stylists on the coasts.
and then the businessman killed himself
Marketing to women doesn’t seem like the secret ingredient to that story.
Out of curiousity, when did this switchover happen?
ATI bought by AMD?
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?
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.
The GPU side admittedly was what kept the CPU side from just imploding. Bulldozer was really really awful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn’t the whole site shut down? IIRC, everyone who had a MySpace page lost it a few years ago.
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.
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If I had to pin an exact date on it, it’d be when he bought the most expensive mansion in Beverly Hills (at the time, $70M was a lot for a mansion).
Why? Because you need to deal with life changes one thing at a time. Pro-tip for the future billionaires currently scrolling this comment section: don’t move away from your friends, family, and home country immediately after getting rich – it might screw with your head a little bit. Do what the old money does: stay grounded, dress down, and pretend to be normal.
pretend to be normal
Me, penniless: Yep, I’m so normal *nervous laughter*
Quite the rolemodel, I’d say! You make it look easy
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Far be it from me to demand frugality from a billionaire. It would have been wiser to waste money without simultaneously scoring an “own goal” on his mental health, though…
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Living, as I do, in a town where I don’t know very many people, I would move back to my hometown to be with my old friends if I got rich. I think that’s the way to do it.
There were hints that he was already on that path and realized that if he didn’t get off when he did, he would have taken his game down too.
Yeah - he decided he wanted a billion dollars more than he wanted his friends. All he had to do was share.
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If you have to share your money for your friends to stick around you, they’re not really friends.
In addition to suddenly being a billionaire, I’m sure life in the public eye didn’t help his situation at all, especially to someone who I imagine spends/spent a lot of time online reading comments from armchair psychologists speaking about him.
Look, if someone wants to give me a billion dollars I will prove that it doesn’t turn you into a Nazi unless you’re already secretly a Nazi.
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.
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What awful changes
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 think the development was reinvigorated when microsoft joined the team here.
Oh yeah, extreme censorship, shitty mob votes, and a DLC marketplace. So reinvigorated.
The whole ‘censorship’ narrative was a nazi psy-op. I literally didn’t even hear about it because I blocked all the mientubers for unrelated issues, and the one guy who did eventually tip me off its existence was essentially parroting talking points straight from that guy who I blocked after I caught him trying to groom his majority child audience that what Notch said on twitter was OK and he was being cancelled.
Like obviously I don’t trust macroshaft to do any chat moderation since they seem to think cracker is a deeply offensive racial slur but ret–d is just harmless banter, but when literally everyone making a stink about it is either an outright nazi propagandist or has close ties to one, it’s hard not to see what’s going on.
The most concerning thing to me is the fact that they can ban users from playing on their own servers. Moderation should be on the server owners imo. Microsoft being able to ban someone from their own server that they self host or pay to host via a third party is a big issue.
That being said, I don’t think that Microsoft’s moderation has been as apocalyptic as a lot of people made it out to be. It’s just the principle that I take some issue with.
I’m generally libleft and I’m quite upset about it. I bought the game. I own the game. They shouldn’t be allowed to take it away from me. What if you were gay and a car bricked itself because the manufacturer didn’t approve of you frequenting a gay bar?
The censorship is kind of rediculous, tbh I thought that was in before Microsoft. Don’t see the rest as negative, and development seems more stable in the new groove, with regular larger updates. Couldn’t vote on mobs at all before, and there is DLC for Minecraft??
All editions have DLC except Java. Many free Java features are paid in other versions. The problem with the mob vote is that they could totally just add all 3, but don’t.
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.
Yup. Comes with the nationality.
Source: am Norwegian
That is what I call untrustworthy source, to much conflict of interest.
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.
Minecraft would’ve died under Notch.
Avoided turning into Meincraft.
Minecraft, not Mein Kampf!
Man Notch really turned out to me a mess didn’t he…? 😥
I remember back in like 2012 he was one of my personal “heros”.
what did he do I don’t know
He got sucked into Right-wing extremism. Posting racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic things on Twitter. Also got into Qanon I think.
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 :)
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. I’m not sure if it is a whole new team or if most people working for Marussia just got rehired by Haas.
IIRC Stewart Grand Prix and then Jaguar Squad. Not an F1 guy though so could definitely be wrong.
Here’s my full list:
You forgot:
i don’t see what you did there
GitHub started adding new good features after being acquired by Microsoft
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.
And now Azure DevOps has completely been forgotten about. I was setting up an web app in Azure and it gave me the option to do continuous integration from GitHub, but not Azure DevOps.
This one hurts. My team at work currently uses AzDO for our build pipeline. It works pretty well, making it easy to trace which build actually got deployed, plus which git branch and commit got built. The variable substitution feature is pretty slick for test vs. prod builds, too.
You can put together continuous integration with Github Actions, but from what I’ve seen so far, it seems so much more primitive :(
didn’t they like… scrape everyone’s open source code for an ai and then gatekeep that shit to their own infra?
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.
Even before that, Apple owes its very existence to an acquisition. Acquiring Next allowed them to abandon their dying OS and start anew with OS X, and brought back in founder Steve Jobs (who Apple had previously fired). With Steve Jobs at the helm, they made the computers cool again to buy some time before the iPod completely turned the company around.
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A similar thing happened with Pixar/Disney, where post acquisition Disney Animation Studios started to work a lot more like Pixar. Interestingly, Steve Jobs was also CEO and majority shareholder at Pixar up until that acquisition.
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It has some dumb problems though. Lack of dual monitor support and virtualization issues are painful for my users.
I can confirm that dual monitors do work on my M2 Max, with the laptop’s own screen I’m at three. I use this setup everyday, no issues.
Is the lack of dual monitor support only for the M1? I have an M1 Pro MBP for a work computer and it works fine with two monitors + the laptop screen
Yeah, it’s only the original M1
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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.
The original plan was a dating site with video profiles!
What could have been…instead we got tinder :/
We had a local grocery chain get bought out by whole foods (before it was amazon). They went from 80% bullshit homeopathic vitamin shit and 20% old rotting produce to stores with actual (if overpriced) food. I’m sure the local vegans and crystal mommies were sad, but I thought it was a huge improvement.
Any chance that was Wild Oats?
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.
I enjoyed the story arc leading up to Endgame, but since then, they’ve filmed so much that I just feel like I can’t keep up. The last movie I watched was Multiverse of Madness where I spent about half the movie going “Huh, I feel like I’m missing stuff from the Wanda TV show”. I had never seen Spider-Man: No Way Home, either. And I guess there was a Loki show and a Marvel “What If” series, too?
Being a Marvel fan shouldn’t have to be a job!
You absolutely needed to watch the show to not get complete whiplash from Scarlet Witch Wanda
Yep. That would require a subscription to disney plus, but I’m not really interested in doing that. It’s too much effort for the payoff.
What’s the payoff? Well, I watched Multiverse of Madness on a flight to see relatives last year. Out of the movies in the plane’s catalog, it was one of the more-interesting ones. So – the payoff is understanding a random in-flight movie a little better.
I might just steer clear of any Marvel movies next time.
Exactly. After they claimed that you wouldn’t need to watch the shows to know what’s going on.
going “Huh, I feel like I’m missing stuff
Thats how it is to read a Marvel comic too. I love it. But it is not for everyone. And in comics there is too much to keep up so you just accept that you cant.
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.
“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.
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.Oops, you are right! It is Ford.
This confused me for a second because folks so often call Valve Software, Volvo 😂
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.
