Very surprising. Not that this happened, but that it happened so soon. I agree that often times these acquisitions have a negative effect on the product (a la Winamp, ICQ, etc.)

However, we can't deny that there are certain things that a small company like Empeg can't do themselves. Exhibit 1: Hugo's statement in the press release:

In reply to:

---

"The deal enables us to focus on what we're best at - developing cool products," Hugo Fiennes, empeg's Technical Director explained. "S3 brings manufacturing skills as well as sales and marketing expertise: together we get to shape the future of listening itself."

---

S3 does, indeed, excel at manufacturing, sales, and marketing. These are things that Empeg, as a small company, has had to deal with, and may indeed distract them from their design and implementation of new features. Did we really expect the co-founder of the company to be soldering our Empeg units forever? I would much rather the guys spend their time on thinking up and implementing new ideas, instead of fixing broken units and responding to tech support requests. I agree that you can't get much better support than from the guys who created the damn thing, but who among us expected that to last forever?

This also opens up the door for service facilities in many countries, and increased availability of replacement parts (A/R coated screens, custom remotes, etc.) The hurdles and pitfalls of this adventurous project can now be cleared much more quickly with S3's technology and marketing muscles waiting to be flexed.

I can see no way in which the negatives of this acquisition will outweigh the positives, and I'm normally skeptical when something like this happens. While I'm sure we would love to keep Empeg as our own little "cult" technology, it's just too far ahead of its time to be kept in a bottle. I'm happy that the Empeg product is going to receive the attention that it deserves, and that the hard work everyone put into it has paid off. They deserve it!

-Tony
MkII #554