

Ask HN: Why do acquiring companies close acquisitions instead of spinning off? - lionhearted

It seems like a lot of failed acquisitions/products are just closed down, but many of them have solid features and code, a decent brand name, and were once promising. Why doesn't a company like Google try to spin off or sell an acquirer company that didn't work for them?
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codeonfire
If the managers that originally pushed the deal through are still with the
acquiring company, spin off or selling the acquired company could be
politically damaging for them.

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BillSaysThis
If all or nearly all of the developers of the product are staying with the
acquirer (and that's usually true, hence the term aqui-hire) the level of
difficulty of (a) recruiting an entire dev team, (b) recovering the months of
lost time and (c) having that team learn the codebase well enough to restart
development would almost certainly kill a product's market opportunity. Maybe
existing users would be happy but the new sales would be very difficult.

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timaelliott
Because the people who ran the product are more useful working on other
projects than pursuing something the company clearly felt was a failure.

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yoonminn
so a product with good brand and following has not much value without the
original founders and teams ? Can't the product be run by a different team and
company?

There are many situations where another company could see value in buying a
product that the acquirer is no longer interested in maintaining.

