Some of these are hard comparisons specifically because what you are describing is really the initial exit. Acquisitions are often not funded by valuation as much as an actual plan to make money.

Something like Minecraft for an example - the existing established customer base with perpetual license was not justification for buying it. The value Microsoft saw was around things like DLC content and cosmetics, and subscription revenue through server hosting.

From what I have observed - one could say that everything Apple acquires is an accu-hire first, for a product they want to ship and trying to find a delivery-focused team to help them with that.

If the company already built a product similar to that and had it hit the market - thats great! It means that they are getting a team which has delivered successfully and maybe even have a significant head start toward Apple's MVP. That likely means also that the team will have a fair bit of autonomy too (and often retain their brands).

DarkSky's product in that light wasn't their app. It was their work on localized weather models and their weather API.

Apple's Weather App doesn't look like DarkSky, but AFAICT you could rebuild the DarkSky app on the WeatherKit REST API (including features like historical weather, and supporting alternative platforms like Android).

With the possible exception of Android (which tbh I have never used) and possibly Minecraft, it's hard to make an argument that any of those acquisitions improved the products. At best they're kept in stasis.

Facebook replaced Instagram with a completely different app, which they then made quite useful to a lot of people. (Sure, I might object to all the strings attached, but there are dimensions along which Instagram was improved – in the same way you can improve a house by bulldozing it and building a dozen single-room flats in its place.)

Github has gotten a lot more unstable (GH Actions outages every couple weeks or so), but it definitely has not been in stasis: the pace of change has been a whole lot higher since the acquisition (and I'd say generally for the better)

It is also hard to argue that they were killed off immediately or slowly died.

You'll find many (including myself) who find Microsoft's purchase of Minecraft to be a huge loss for the game. I'll admit that the acquisition wasn't the calamity people were fearing, but overall it's still been a net negative or stagnation at best.

For starters they split the community among bedrock & java. And while a minecraft copy leveraging a C++ was a good idea, it seems they've mostly made the split to justify adding heavy monetization for skins and world maps to bedrock. (Maybe they feared backlash if they did that to the OG Java version?) This monetization seems to have killed people's appetite for hobby-project mods and maps.

Likewise, it's clear that the intended demographic of their marketing has become much younger. From the mob votes, the type of things that go in updates, it seems that what's added is far less deep. That updates are now more of a social media "Llamas in minecraft, look how goofy they are!" stunt.

I recently started a 1.7.10 modded world, and was surprised to see just how much stuff was already there. The only newer vanilla things that I found I missed were bees and slime blocks.

Maybe it's nostalgia, but this version feels nicer, like it's cohesive, and respects me as a player more.