If you knowingly sell your house to a crack dealer? Well, yeah.
“Beloved website sells out to tech giant, who promptly ruins it” is basically the Web 2.0 story. Hell, a lot of the time that’s the goal–entrepreneurs are going into business with the stated intention of getting enough people to love their company that they can sell it to Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Microsoft/Apple for a gazillion dollars, then ditch those annoying customers and retire. Listen to some Y-Combinator folks talk about “exit strategies” and “acqui-hires” and see if your cynicism doesn’t go up a few notches.
I’m not trying to shift blame away from Yahoo. I’m saying that, when you sell out to a big company, they will fuck up everything you’ve built in the pursuit of higher profits, or just because they don’t give enough of a shit. You can’t work in tech right now and not know this. People sell out for two reasons: their business model has failed and they need new money to save their company, or they don’t give a shit about the company and just want a fat wad of cash.
