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What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?
The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.
These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.
By the end of the nineties the Web had risen to become a huge factor in the world economy, and we were at the height of the dot-com bubble. Billion-dollar acquisitions of Web companies were not uncommon.
This article lists billion-dollar Web acquisitions that never delivered on their promise. Some companies and services dwindled away into obscurity, some were sold for significantly less money than they were bought for, and some just crashed and burned.
Many of these brands are still in use today, though they don’t have the luster they once had.
