Watching an acquirer ruin your company
Possibly more common is when the company is bought specifically to shut it down, because the product&#x27;s success would hurt, or is hurting, sales of their own product.<p>There used to be a category of software called &quot;electronic design automation&quot;. It presented an interactive editor where you could enter the schematic diagram of an integrated circuit, and also enter a chip layout, and it would ensure that they matched. It was big business. But &quot;silicon compilers&quot; that needed only the schematic, and generated the chip layout, threatened that business.<p>So, in the mid-to-late &#x27;80s the biggest EDA company set about buying up early-stage silicon compiler companies and shutting them down. That was doomed, but bought them several years during which silicon compilers were (therefore) not available for people to use. The company is still in business today, but sells very different things.<p>General Motors bought up more carmakers to, effectively, shut down than probably any other.<p>Sometimes a company can be bought for less than it would cost to hire as many staff as they have. So, they are bought and shut down, and the employees are put to work on various other projects. Google&#x27;s hiring system is so Byzantine that buying companies, bypassing it, might be their main recruiting method.<p>One might even buy a company because its product has a name they want to use for their own product. The momentary importance of domain names in the late &#x27;90s caused a fair bit of that.<p>None of these contradict one another. A company might be bought for any or all reasons at the same time.<p>So when your company is bought, expecting its product to come out the other side is naïve.