Particularly when the startups don’t have a proven business model and are still evolving.
As a consumer I generally don’t like to see my favorite web services getting bought by larger companies. Most often the innovation stagnates when that happens. The recent history is littered with examples of this: skype (ebay) - delicious, flickr, jumpcut, bix, mybloglog, dialpad, webjay(yahoo) - jaiku, jotspot, feedburner, dodgeball, grand central (google) to just name a few. Now I hear that AOL may be regretting its purchase of bebo. I saw that coming when AOL purchased them.
This the reason why I don’t want twitter to be sold to facebook or anyone. I think twitter is onto something and I want to see where that leads to.
[...] Facebook also may find twitter out of their price range and would like to neutralize the growth and success of twitter. Integrating twitter like functionalitty is a move in that direction. Facebook, like twitter, is still looking for an effective way to monetize their users. This adds to the risk of facebook acquiring twitter. [...]
Pingback by Facebook’s twitter clone « Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking — March 11, 2009 @ 2:58 pm
[...] time ago, I wrote a post called acquiring web startups is risky. PaidContent has an analyst interview that touches on this same topic. It pretty much echoes what I [...]
Pingback by Why internet acquistions are risky « Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking — April 8, 2009 @ 7:44 pm
[...] web startups is risky. Here is an example. Techcrunch reports ebay sold stumbleupn to its original [...]
Pingback by Ebay dumps stumbleupon « Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking — April 13, 2009 @ 12:44 pm