I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.

As so often happens, that didn't last long.

Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand.

I'm sure there are countless other examples.

This is a general observation, no hard data, but I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. By 2 years a lot of the best talent leave the company entirely or go somewhere else in the company. Things can cruise along just fine for a bit, but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves it gets worse and worse. Couple that with the bureaucracy and insanity of a global mega-corporation, the quality fades slowly at first, then it picks up.

I'm afraid this is a form of reversion to the mean. Successful startups are made of exceptional people: the founders, the initial investors, the first employees, the first clients. But when they get acquired by much larger companies, they are necessarily diluted in pool of people that are more "normal", less exceptional. This includes the customer base that is more "normal" as well. Slowly but surely, the extraordinary product/service the startup has been developing reverts to the mean. This is quite sad, because it feels inevitable. I'd like to know how to avoid it.

> CA (where software goes to die)

CA got bought (ironically) by Broadcom 8 years ago, so now Broadcom is where software goes to die.

Slack has suffered the same thing under Salesforce.

Big companies usually buy other small companies for their users, once the users move to their platform, things change.

It's just beancounters doing what they do best, counting beans and screwing up what was previously alright.

> Everything becomes the numbers game.

Death by spreadsheet. Happens to everything.

Hey, you leave Creative Assembly out of this!

> GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters

Can you explain what you mean by this? Like what does "fine" mean? What, specifically in the management, is the "decline"? What does "craters" mean?