Just because they're not planning to change it doesn't mean they won't.
My experience in a small startup acquired by a large multinational is that all the unintended things -- the processes, procedures, standards, overhead -- add up to massive unintended change.
Example: we had an integration process between salesforce.com and our core product underway when we got bought. Sales guys would be able to hit a button and orders would flow directly into our product for execution -- eliminating overhead, reducing errors, and improving yield by allowing better forecasting and delivery.
The large multinational conducted a review, and told us that in order to avoid running afoul of corporate standards, we'd have to migrate our sales tracking to SAP, and integrate with SAP instead. The project was put on hold. The hold grew longer when it turned out that currency issues in the large multinational's SAP implementation would prevent us from billing certain foreign customers in their local currency. Then we realized our budget wouldn't permit us to use this radically more expensive product, and there wasn't a magic SAP budget out there for us to tap into. A year later, we were still using salesforce.com, without a connection to our core product.
I'm all in favor of acquisitions, and this will probably be a great thing for mint -- contrary to (say) the rant from 37signals today. But don't expect that it's not going to change things.
My experience in a small startup acquired by a large multinational is that all the unintended things -- the processes, procedures, standards, overhead -- add up to massive unintended change.
Example: we had an integration process between salesforce.com and our core product underway when we got bought. Sales guys would be able to hit a button and orders would flow directly into our product for execution -- eliminating overhead, reducing errors, and improving yield by allowing better forecasting and delivery.
The large multinational conducted a review, and told us that in order to avoid running afoul of corporate standards, we'd have to migrate our sales tracking to SAP, and integrate with SAP instead. The project was put on hold. The hold grew longer when it turned out that currency issues in the large multinational's SAP implementation would prevent us from billing certain foreign customers in their local currency. Then we realized our budget wouldn't permit us to use this radically more expensive product, and there wasn't a magic SAP budget out there for us to tap into. A year later, we were still using salesforce.com, without a connection to our core product.
I'm all in favor of acquisitions, and this will probably be a great thing for mint -- contrary to (say) the rant from 37signals today. But don't expect that it's not going to change things.