[funkysquid]

I find it strange that large companies envy the things smaller shops are able to do, and they'll spend the money to buy them up, but they won't spend the time to understand the culture that let them build what they built. Put employees first and you'll find they can do some pretty amazing things.

[brazzledazzle]

It is really bizarre. I think it really comes down to managers/execs realizing that but there's an imbalance of power towards risk averse groups like legal, finance and HR who have been given the latitude to make stupid decisions.

CEOs of these large companies really need to step up and take control of these groups who develop an unreasonable amount of risk aversion due to a long history of dealing with issues that have a great deal of gravity for them even though they're fairly minor for the organization overall.

There are some companies that get this right, but a general shift hasn't happened yet and there's probably quite a few CEOs that can't justify the political expense and fallout without the backing of a major culture shift in businesses at large. It might be years or even decades before that happens and it's going to be sad to see small agile companies fall to it in the meantime.

[wpietri]

The only way I have been able to explain this is that the expressed purpose of management hierarchies, which is generally about running successful businesses, is almost entirely different than their actual purpose.

As to the actual purpose, I think it's a similar deal to feudalism. Whatever waffle kings and nobles said, looking back it was pretty clearly about self-aggrandizement, filling one's pockets, taking revenge upon one's enemies, et cetera, ad nauseam.

I guess this shouldn't be surprising; primates gonna prime.

[johnward]

No only that. You will see some mega corp acquire some smaller company for their proprietary tech. Then replace that tech with something else, often open source, or just not use the technology they acquired at all. Are they just going for acquihire? Swallowing up competitors? It blows my mind.

[bro-stick]

It might be jealousy combined with power to destroy something cool and maybe eliminate something a competitor might leverage. If they're fewer cool companies thriving, it makes the sucky behemoths look less terrible by comparables.

[utuxia]

i think its just them putting chips on the table then spinning the wheel.