What are some Internet/software startups that flourished after being acquired?

[nlz1]

For background on this question, read the following: https://gist.github.com/1641705

In recent weeks, I've seen a lot of stories of Internet/software that withered once acquired by a larger company: WinAmp, Flickr, Meebo, etc.

My question is - what are some examples of Internet/software companies that flourished after acquisition? i.e.

- The product / service retained its user experience / brand / identity.

- The user base saw an increase / improvement in feature delivery (rather than a "freeze" of new releases).

- Users were not subjected to "monetization" of the previously free / freemimum business model of the startup, i.e. intrusive banner ads / bloatware forced upon them.

- The acquiring company left the startup management / development team alone, rather than shaking up / forcing out the team that built the company.

Note: Aware of but don't want to include Woot or Zappos, those are e-commerce startups.

[redspark]

Very rarely is a company of any type acquired to just be left intact. Typically you acquire a company for a) the talent b) the technology c) you believe you can make changes to the business to drastically increase the margin. Typically that would be integrating it into your company and sharing resources.

I think you are going to be hard pressed to find a company that was acquired and basically left alone and then flourished.

You know those movies where one civilization just destroys another and abuses the resources, then moves on. It's kind of like that, just slightly more "civilized".

[israelyc]

I agree - the question should be "What are some Internet/software startups that their technology and team flourished after being acquired?"

And you can find many examples for that.. Oingo/Applied Semantics turned into AdSense by Google would be a good example (and most of Google's successful products: DoubleClick, Analytics etc.)

[onlyup]

Apple bought Siri, which is pretty popular. Obviously this was integrated fully and not left as a stand alone technology.

Did Google initial buy a map company to start Google Maps?

[clavoie]

Yeah, the australian company called Where 2. Keyhole (another acquisition) quickly became Google Earth. YouTube, DoubleClick, Urchin (Google Analytics).

Google's been surprisingly good at making acquisition flourish (and has had some examples on how not to do it... DodgeBall anyone?)

[riskish]

YouTube.