What’s a company that objectively improved after it got “bought out?”

ch00f@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 272 points –

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?

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Up to a point, now it feels worse and worse every new version.

I've been feeling lately that Google has lost the plot. Material You is an ugly, inconsistent mess, usability is worse, and you can't expect any feature to stick around because Google is so unreliable.

Android 11 was the last version that felt refined and stable. It was clean, usable, and organized.

I'm going to say 10 because I think 11 was when they first started making it difficult to move apps to SD card external storage and for me that was the beginning of the fuckery.

It's hard to justify keeping a feature around that potentially breaks new features for such a small population tbh.

Honestly, it feels like Google lost the plot (for the most part) almost a decade ago. Android was really the only product that was consistently chugging along; most of their projects have been nothing but premature cancellations, even if the product was actually good (I'm looking at you, Inbox).

I'm currently really mad at them for setting up to cancel Google Podcasts just so they can move podcasts into YouTube Music.

Why do these companies keep having to consolidate functions into ever-more complex apps? What happened to the separation of function so that they do one thing really well instead of many things poorly?