IBM to acquire Confluent

IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything. Finally, the core IBM sales force will start to make demands on them and will short to ground any vestiges of energy, time, opportunity and motivation they might have left. The good team members will leave and join a former business partner, or decide to spend more time with the family. They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer. But then these meetings will become fewer and fewer. Finally they’ll find a way of massaging their resumes to cast the last years as being “at the heart of AI infrastructure”.

Pretty bleak, and describes my experience to a T (although involving other companies). Has there ever been an example where a company has been acquired and culture/morale/conditions have actually improved rather than dissolved?

I wouldn't describe it as improved necessarily, but successfully integrated. This happened many times - youtube by google for example. Facebook acquisitions are pretty successful too (not looking if it was good for humanity, just from business perspective).

Some companies like Amazon buy companies and let them run almost independently - IMDB for example, Zappos, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zoox, Audible.

Android was also an acquistion by Google, run relatively separately, and it grew into something huge