What’s a company that objectively improved after it got “bought out?”
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?
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.
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.
Minecraft would've died under Notch.
Avoided turning into Meincraft.
Minecraft, not Mein Kampf!
Why explore new chunks? Why raze entire villages? Lebensraum
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.
oh damn :(
Got an hour and a half? https://youtu.be/j6CnTzWNyds?si=0vJVjqFhvSOwrz9N
What are some of the things he said that were classified as that?
Someone below me posted a big video on that. Other than that it takes two seconds to Google. He has a history of saying extremely reactionary things (advocating for a straight pride parade, saying feminism is a disease, being transgender is just a mental illness etc.) And then walking it back which is weird that it happens over and over again. He also unironically believed in Qanon.
Maybe not an outright fascist bigot but however his social system and brain works, it leads him to fall face first over and over into extreme right wing reactionary takes.
An answer to this question which indicates it’s not a lie would be something like
My answer.
Sorry I’m not willing to put in effort to prove someone else’s claim.
I’ve tried in the past and googling in circumstances like this leads to nothing.
You're right, your ignorance is a choice.
You can either be lazy enough to accept things at face value or take the time to verify people's claims, you can't really have both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#Controversy
TL;DR: Racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia over Twitter
Same with wurm online
What what.
I thought Wurm online is essentially still dead 🤔
Still going strong 🤷
No, not dead. Works for me.
I agree But for a while he didn't even do anything It was just jeb
And I think it could of worked out But even with all of the dumb stuff Microsoft brought I can't say it was a bad thing
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
What awful changes
Accidental delete.
Like forcing everyone over to a microsoft account, which will sneakily force you to hand over your phone number for verification for "suspicious activity" ~1 week after registration, no matter what you do or don't do.
There was also something about channeling all server chat messages to a central filtering team/system, and irreversibly banning anyone who said something that's not "child safe", even if it was just on a private server where the measure was not turned off
I guess the Microsoft account thing I don't really get, it wasn't difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff
Idk about the filtering thing, i definitely don't like it in theory but also haven't seen anyone actually banned/muted due to it, definitely doesn't make sense that it's enabled by default on private servers, should have been a realms only thing, then again a majority of servers with most of the population likely aren't on realms
For new MS accounts they now require a phone number. Not at registration, but in a week after it.
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
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.
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 agree but also don't understand where your problem really is, like you want it to be more frustrating to use the non-intended things in the first place?
The fact that you can make crazy raid or iron farms isn't a bad thing, compare that to how "normies" would play the game and how trying to balance the two would mean just overall worse experience for the normies most likely with more work needed also by the more in-depth farmers.
Rereading your prior response, I think I get where you're coming from, but I feel like it'd be very hard to balance such a large difference between the player bases/styles, like if mob drops were nerfed then typical players would noticably get less loot, or some people aren't into the designing aspect of farm creation but do it simply for the resources because they prefer to build or create redstone contraptions, idk.
I want the mechanics to have more depth and to be more challenging and fun to work with. Most normies don't build farms so the game would be pretty much unchanged for them. You could still make easy farms if you want to dip your toes into it but the effort to reward ratio would be more balanced.
Can you give another specific example for something you would want changed that you think would give you a greater challenge and would leave average players experience unchanged?
Not really off the top of my head so I'll elaborate on the points I've already made to demonstrate why I think these things are such an issue. It also goes to show that with a few minor changes, Mojang would be able to balance these things super easily.
Portal based farms are really the worst culprit, imo. It's the meta for loads and loads of different mob farms and just consists of a cube of portals making all these once separate farming concepts basically the same. They're also incredibly overpowered and yield huge amounts of items. I remember back in the day people spent lots of time perfecting the designs of their big farms and there really hasn't been much interesting development in the tech community because portal based farms are super fast, easy to throw together, and get you more items than most other designs. I think removing them would force people to be more creative again. This is a pretty common sentiment in a large part of the tech community. Here are a couple of portal farms and you'll see that things get boring real fast:
Slime: https://youtu.be/cerBKl6Gzeg?si=27PPAqpeVaOmJ8ID
Guardian: https://youtu.be/n_IH6LUYyMk?si=fAtOK47fv-5Qhjvs
Ghast (I'm on mobile so I can't timestamp but you can skip about 30mins in): https://youtu.be/ZlefdidnABI?si=H7Rlhb3yKIB8SyVp
Wither skeletons: https://youtu.be/Dj5JedJuXrY?si=7JjKvU5uMYlmY3Pz
There are quite a few more mobs that can be farms in the same way but I think that proves the point enough.
Raid farms tech has also gotten absurd lately if you check out this: https://youtu.be/owuP8P4s_8g?si=2sjTYPAHNG0dVcfi. That farm produces hundreds of thousands of items per hour and can be built in an hour or two. The raid stacking mechanics are really overpowered. I think raid farms should definitely be a thing and some of the simpler designs are decently balanced but stacking farms are game breaking. For reference, this farm yields more witch drops than scicraft's witch farm project which took years to finish.
I'm really just speaking in terms of my little niche corner of the game. Nerfing portal based farms or stacking raid farms wouldn't really effect anyone outside of technical players because it requires some obsidian farming setup as a barrier or entry. Stacking raid farms, while easy to build for technical servers, are still a little bit above the skill level where it would be something casual players would build.
I know that you can always just not build these farms if they're boring, but it's really stagnated cool farm development in the entire community. It's more than just an individual decision because most tech servers these days just reluctantly go the easy route because the time and effort involved in developing more interesting concepts isn't worth it in comparison to the amount of items you get from the easy route. I've also played on tech servers where we agreed to work on a new concept but some players decide to just go and build a portal based farm anyways discouraging people from spending their time to design a new farm for items which we already have plenty of.
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.
Just set the server to offline mode...
That's a security risk because users can log in as other users. Regardless, if you paid for the game, you should be able to play on third party multiplayer servers.
True on the risk aspect, there are authentication plugins you can get instead on the server side.
On the ban aspect, I don't see people making this claim for Steam, if you get banned on Steam you lose all your games, not just a $30 purchase, and maybe don't call people slurs in online text chat? Idk, it seems like it was just an overhyped concern with few actually getting banned that didn't deserve it somewhat.
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.
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 :)
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 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.
IIRC Stewart Grand Prix and then Jaguar Squad. Not an F1 guy though so could definitely be wrong.
GitHub started adding new good features after being acquired by Microsoft
didn't they like... scrape everyone's open source code for an ai and then gatekeep that shit to their own infra?
Thats kinda hard to prove though
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.
Yeah, I don't think anyone's denying that MS is a shitty company; we're just talking about companies that have either improved, or haven't gotten significantly worse, because some other company bought them out.
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 :(
GitHub recently got merge queues. I desperately want something like it for AzDops.
Interesting, sounds like merge queues can streamline some of the housekeeping around PRs. I'll have to read up on them some more.
I wasn't thinking about differences between Github and AzDops repos, only between GH actions and AZ pipelines. My team moved the code to Github a long time ago -- AZ pipelines is perfectly happy having the code there.
Hmm, now I wonder if anyone keeps their code in AZ Repos and their CI stuff in Github Actions (probably not, it sounds absurd!)
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.
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.
Ive been running 2 1440p monitors off a M1 Mini since it's launch, one over HDMI and one over DisplayPort via USB C... What're you talking about?
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
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
Agreed. They should keep him in the role. He's the fan favorite.
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.
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.
Honestly, I just thought it was mostly boring except for that one Darth Vader scene.
Modok was terrible but the overall movie was alright imho
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
With Disney buying starwars I didn't like what they did with the sequels but just about everything else they did amazingly
Here's my full list:
You forgot:
i don't see what you did there
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.
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 😂
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 :/
Certainly not rich enough to host the amount of content it does, or pay content creators what they get paid.
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?
Hahaha yes
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.
Appalachian Mountain Brewery.
They paved the way for new breweries in a little mountain town in western North Carolina. They consistently gave significant percentages to charities, often local. They built a recognized brand and then sold to Anheuser Busch InBev. AB InBev helped them reach new craft beer drinkers with a huge corporate backing. The business ran the same as far as a local consumer could tell. They got a lot of new insight and opportunities.
And then two of the original founders bought it back from AB InBev. First time that's ever happened. Really great guys too. Very happy to continue to see their journey.
That sounds a lot like Chipotle. Sold to McDonalds, exploded in popularity, and bought themselves back.
Now it's time they sold it back. Those fuckers won't let me order my precious queserito anymore :(
The beer bust is happening. Craft beer isn't the darling it money maker it was a decade ago.
Sounds like this brewery navigated this well and sold high and bought low, but the amount of breweries closing by me is crazy
Where do you live? I'm in Oregon and we probably have 40 breweries in my midsized city. I'm wondering if its just a matter of market saturation where only the strong survive. Funnily enough, I'm currently in Kona, Hawaii on vacation and bought some Kona Brewing Co. beer. Turns out it was brewed and bottled in Portland, Oregon.
OTOH, I find that IPAs are super 'effin saturated and not that great after drinking them over the years. It seems like every brewer wants to jump into IPAs even though you already have 47 choices at every convenience store in the country.
I'm in Portland. I feel like a brewery closes every month or so.
I mean: Burnside, Royale, Laurelwood, Grains of Wrath, brewery 26, Hair of the Dog, Pono, Modern Times, Sasquatch, Portland Brewing... those are the ones I can think of off hand
AB InBev does some great stuff with their craft owners. If it made sense for them to buy it back that's awesome, but their mantra around craft really is: "you've got success, we're just going to give you more tools". A lot of the big folks like Duvall operate that way and you wind up with regional breweries shipping kegs around the world.
Android being bought by Google
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?
You know out of all things i miss the candy names
We'd be up to Android "Toffee" with Android "Uncooked Cookie Dough" coming out soon.
It seems they still use dessert-based codenames internally. Apprently, Android 13 is Tiramisu, and Android 14 is Upside-Down Cake.
🤯 Holy crap how did I not know this! I thought they developed it in house!
Looked up the history and they bought it so early on that effectively the whole thing was developed by Google.
They bought the startup in 2005 and the first phone came out in 2008.
Android used to be it's own thing, check out the "Droid" phones.
What do you mean by this? What did Motorola Droid phones have to do with Google owning Android or Android being it's own company back in like... 2003? The first Droid used Android as developed by Google in 2009. Google had aquired Android years prior to Droid being a thing. Most Android devices are not created by Google, even to this day.
I didn't realize that Google owned the company at that time. I don't remember the advertisements blasting Google's name like they tend to do now. I know that most Android phones aren't made by Google, I was mistaken in thinking the Droid was a popular android device prior to acquisition
This is exactly why they started blasting their name on everything lol
"droid" was actually a verizon brand, not motorola or google. any droid-branded phone was a verizon rebranding of a phone that was sold as something else outside the US.
but yeah, android never existed outside of google. Google bought out android before their first public release.
The Droid turbo phone did nothing wrong.
I think android 7 was where it peaked with development and features.
It's been jvm dalvik hell since then with Google taking a dump on the Linux kernel.
Perhaps 8 or 9 in my opinion - removing background clipboard access in 10 was a Huge defeature.
I jumped from 8 to 13 on my (new) personal devices, so I missed a lot of firsthand experience, but the clipboard thing still affected me by making apps like Google Translate worse.
13 does seem pretty nice in a lot of ways - notifications are even more capable than they were in 8, for example. But I do notice it being more restrictive in some ways too.
YouTube too. For all the shit we give Google for it, there's no way it could've grown into what it is if it didn't have all that spare cash to burn.
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.
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.
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.
Saw one in traffic the other day and loved the look but wondered if they still live in the shop these days
Great looks and shit everything else would be super on-brand for Jaguar
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).
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.
I do enjoy a BANANA brand banana
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.
I feel my hate for bananas is justified by such behavior.
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.
TO;DR:
Luxury items and brands that we don't really need seem to get better after being bought out. The rest is fucked.
The company I work for got bought out and from my perspective things have only improved. From the perspective of the random customer who has the first thing go wrong in half a decade though? Those immediately blame the acquisition.
Did they keep most employees on?
The only employee replaced was the owner, which I'm not sure that counts. Another one resigned a few months after, because they found a new job.
Cool :)
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.")
Gucci. It got bought out by PPR in the 90's, they replaced everything but the name pretty much. Tom Ford's work as the new head designer turned Gucci into the iconic modern luxury brand it is today.
(I only really know this as I was slightly obsessed with that House Of Gucci show with Lady Gaga in it. She's a fantastic actress.)
I was kinda hoping Microsoft would improve Activision.
Someone’s an optimist.
The bar to be an improvement is so obscenely low that it's almost impossible for Microsoft not to be better.
I’m generally pro-Xbox but don’t consider myself a fanboy. I think the acquisition will be good for both brands.
I do worry about what they’ll do with the Blizzard IPs, but at this point I’m worried about Blizzard regardless.
Blizzard destroyed warcraft 3, quite possibly the greatest game ever made, with their "reforged" bullshit and I can never forgive them for that. I swore them off afterward. I am ashamed to say that I caved and bought Diablo 4 and was reminded what a shit company they are because they somehow managed to suck all the fun out of that too.
In the development world, Microsoft is actually doing some legitimately good work since the end of the Balmer years. Back then open source was a cancer that needed to be eliminated. Now they have VSCode (maybe the most popular IDE at the moment), develop and release Typescript under an open license, and own github (still a bit of a mixed bag but they're trying).
Narrator: They won't.
Only if Bobby Kotick will be replaced by a real game developer and not a suit.
Supposedly, Kotick is out if Microsoft gets to take over. My assumption was that Microsoft won't wanna keep running the IP into the ground right after acquiring it
It's hard to believe that Microsoft is going to own World of Warcraft.
I look forward to fighting Clippy as a raid boss
I've not played wow since legion but I would come back for that
I've never played wow but might have to try if that happens
Well they certainly can’t turn it into the worst gaming company because EA still exists.
I think Activision-Blizzard passed EA in badness years ago. Maybe Square Enix did too.
Like, when's the last time there was an EA controversy beyond "game's bad?" And even then I've only really heard sports games and Battlefield are bad.
I dunno, I still think EA has them beat on greed with microtransactions. The new launcher is absolutely littered with Battlefield 4 shortcut packs at full price (lol) and Sims stuff, hell I don't even play The Sims. You're not wrong about ActiBlizz though, I am pretty pissed at them for shutting down Overwatch and I don't like OW2 so I don't play it. But I've always felt like EA was trying to nickle and dime everyone to death more than any other company. And I absolutely hate what they've done with Respawn. But yeah, you make a good argument. They both suck.
Its still too soon, isnt it? Like regulators still havent OKd it and stuff yet.
Yeah I think they approved it and are now reexamining it once again.
You can still hope. The acquisition is not complete yet.
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.
Maybe medical? Like, Bio-Ntech designed the COVID vaccine, Pfizer bought it and could wrap up the phase 3 trials and then scale production?
So, they didn't actually make the product better, but they probably made it viable sooner than if they hadn't bought it?
But that is kind of the normal process for the medical industry at this point..start ups developing new medicine and then shopping it to Big Pharma for buyouts or funding
Pfizer did not buy BioNtech. They just got a production licence.
Oh interesting! I didn't realize that. I work tangentially with pharma start ups and development and just assumed they were bought out. I've seen that happen enough times that it felt expected. Thanks for the clarification!
I don't think Phizer did anything to make the vaccine better, just more available. Their size makes it possible to do things at larger scale. Phizer has pretty much given up on doing any R&D and now just buys up smaller innovative companies. They extract out any patents and other IP they want, and move on. I work in pharma, and everyone I know who's worked for them in the past has a story about how Pfizer came in, bought their facility, then shut the doors within a couple years. Definitely didn't make the lives of all those workers better, who had to uproot their families and find new jobs elsewhere.
Bethesda buying Id Software.
I don't think we should be too surprised by this. If a company isn't all that good before a conglomerate buys it, then it's unlikely to be widely known. Conversely, if a small company is widely known, it's likely to be exceptionally good. So, even if acquisition usually just results in regression to the mean, we'll still mostly have heard of ones that degraded the company.
Mobils shoes got bought by Mephisto and they're amazing shoes now, same as their parent company
Oculus. No way they would have otherwise had the money to make cheap standalone VR headsets like the Quest.
No way would they have forced you to sign up to/in to meta either though.
Everything that has a store requires an account.
The short time during which they required a Facebook account (i.e. an account linked to an unrelated service) was a fuck-up, but they have since reversed that decision. Now it's just a separate standalone VR-related account.
If anything, that is still better than the current Google/Apple situation with their accounts, which link together a bunch of unrelated services (photos, email, payments, storage sync, etc.) in an inseparable way.
I still refuse anh thing that requires a fb account I will pay more for a vr headset to not fucking deal with that
Sorry to break it to you bruh, but if Facebook owns the IP, they're harvesting and monetizing the account data, end of.
This includes all of the subsidiaries like Instagram and WhatsApp as well.
Let's also not forget that illegal activity exposes user data in addition to greed, and just the fact that your data is in yet another pot increases your risk. Also yes all corporations are greedy and evil but they're definitely not all equal in how bad they are, and FB is one of the worst
Are you willing to compromise on all of these intrusions into your life? Many people are, but I'm not one.
Ok, so Facebook knows I have a VR headset and bought some games, and they're using that information in targeted advertising (as much as things like EU law allows them where I live)? Quite frankly, I don't care - this doesn't really affect me in any practical sense - and again, thanks to existing laws, I can actually opt out from a large part of it.
From a practical standpoint, I would have a much bigger problem with a situation that exists with Google, where some people had access to their email and other services disabled, because some stupid bot classified their comments in YouTube livestream as spam with basically no recourse until the story blew up in tech news (https://gamerant.com/markiplier-stream-ban-lock-users-out-of-gmail/). The root of the issue there is that those accounts just shouldn't be linked, and what you do on YouTube shouldn't affect your access to your own email etc.
You may argue that this is simply down to the fact that Facebook doesn't have a strong enough market position to get away with such practices, and that they would do it too if they could, but as it stand today, the giants like Google or Apple are far worse. (And with most of these problems, as well as other monopolistic practices of tech giants, regulation can be a large part of the solution.)
You don't actually need an account to use an android phone with Aurora and fdroid And the index is just a headset, you don't need steam to use it, valve doesn't do walled gardens AFAIK