[papabrown]

Way too many examples of this over the years. First one that I can remember off the top of my head was AOL buying Global Network Navigator (GNN). Great resource. AOL took their dial up subscribers and killed the website.

Of course, AOL switched it's focus away from dial up once it went unlimited shortly after so the entire acquisition did nothing but to make a valuable resource disappear.

AOL and Yahoo have been buying up companies, killing them, and then writing off the losses for years. This spans multiple management teams. It's inbred into the system.

It cracks me up that these two companies with years and years worth of fail between them, are somehow going to combine and become a winning organization.

Full Disclosure: I worked for a company purchased by AOL in the early 1990's, they immediately came in and ramped it up to about 120 people, and then killed it and fired everyone less than a year later.

That one was over an internal power struggle at AOL. One management team loved the idea, bought the company, and then lost political power. His replacement came in and killed everything his predecessor had been working on.