Meta bought Instagram for $1 billion and somehow made it worse. They bought WhatsApp for $19 billion and filled it with ads. They bought Oculus for $2 billion and turned it into a Facebook login requirement nightmare. Now they're doing the same shit to AI companies.
The pattern is always identical: Buy innovative company → Force integration with Meta's systems → Add Facebook login requirements → Destroy what made the company good → Act surprised when talent leaves.
The Corporate Integration Death Spiral
Meta acquired Kustomer for customer service AI, then sold it 18 months later after completely fucking up the integration. They bought AI startup Ozlo for virtual assistants, killed the product 6 months later.
The problem isn't money - Meta throws stupid cash at these deals. The problem is they force every acquisition to work within Facebook's existing infrastructure instead of letting good engineering teams do what made them successful.
Ozlo had a decent voice assistant running on 50MB of memory. Meta's integration team decided it needed to use Facebook's identity system, Graph API, and content moderation pipeline. Final result: 800MB memory footprint and 3-second response delays. Product died because it became unusable.
When Engineers Would Rather Quit Than Work for Meta
Talked to a former Ozlo engineer who quit 3 months after the acquisition. They went from shipping AI features weekly to spending 2 months getting approval for a button color change. Meta's legal team required every user interaction to go through privacy compliance checks that added 200ms latency.
"We built a voice assistant that could understand natural language in real-time," they said. "Meta's systems turned it into a web form that happened to use speech recognition."
The best engineers don't stay when you turn their real-time AI system into another Facebook feature that loads slowly and asks for permissions every 5 minutes.
The Facebook Platform Tax Ruins Everything
Every Meta acquisition gets forced onto the Facebook platform eventually. Instagram used to have simple photo filters and chronological feeds. Now it's algorithmic hell with shopping features, Reels copying TikTok, and mandatory Facebook account linking.
WhatsApp was end-to-end encrypted messaging that "just worked." Meta added Stories (nobody wanted), Business API integration (slow and buggy), and payment features (broken in most countries). They turned the world's best messaging app into another Facebook product.
AI startups get the same treatment. Your elegant machine learning API becomes part of Facebook's advertising platform. Your real-time inference engine gets wrapped in React and takes 5 seconds to load because it needs to download 50MB of JavaScript first.
Microsoft and Google Don't Destroy Everything They Touch
Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion and left it the fuck alone. GitHub still works exactly like it did before Microsoft owned it, except now it has better uptime and free private repositories. The acquisition has been praised for maintaining GitHub's independence.
Google bought Kaggle and Kaggle still operates like an independent data science platform. They didn't force it to integrate with Gmail or require Google+ accounts.
The difference is simple: successful acquirers understand that they bought the company because it was already good at something. Meta acquires companies and immediately tries to "improve" them by making them more like Facebook.
The Real Cost of Meta's Integration Obsession
Meta has spent over $30 billion on AI and VR acquisitions in the past 5 years. How many of those companies still exist as independent products? Maybe 10%.
The rest got absorbed into Meta's platform and lost what made them special. Oculus became "Meta Quest" and requires Facebook accounts. Instagram became a TikTok clone with shopping ads. WhatsApp became Facebook Messenger with worse performance.
Every acquisition follows the same playbook:
- Buy innovative company for ridiculous money
- Force integration with Facebook's systems within 6 months
- Add Facebook branding and login requirements
- Watch original team quit when their product becomes slow and shitty
- Shut down the product 18 months later when users abandon it
- Blame "market conditions" instead of admitting you ruined it
When Good Companies Die for No Reason
Parse was a backend service that developers loved. Simple API, worked reliably, reasonable pricing. Facebook bought it, tried to integrate it with Facebook Login, usage dropped 60%, shut it down 2 years later.
Developers didn't want their backend API tied to Facebook's identity system. They wanted a simple database API that worked without forcing users to create Facebook accounts. Meta couldn't understand why anyone would want that.
The engineering team that built Parse in 6 months spent 18 months trying to untangle it from Facebook's systems before giving up and starting new companies.
The Pattern Never Changes
Meta's approach to acquisitions is corporate cancer. They identify successful products, pay premium to acquire them, then systematically destroy what made them successful by forcing Facebook integration.
The result is always the same: original team leaves, users abandon the product, Meta shuts it down and writes off billions in "impairment charges."
Other AI startups are watching this shitshow and choosing to stay independent rather than get acquired. When Zuckerberg comes calling with $10 billion, smart founders are saying no because they've seen what happens to companies that take Meta's money.