The business model: Let's destroy the competition, because our CEO and other leaders are greedy.
Strategic Acquisition = Buy out the Competition.
A rant against huge corporations who want you to PAY THEM to GIVE THEM YOUR YEARS OF RESEARCH, while they buy out all the smaller free sites, then charge huge yearly or monthly subscription prices. Eyes on Ancestry, here.
Greedy CEO's who pay themselves and their top leaders upwards of 100x the pay of their employees. Another strategy was used by WalMart - undercut everyone's prices, destroy small family businesses across the USA, then set the price we charge, because we destroyed the competition.
Ancestry bought out the original Rootsweb and members were told it would be "forever available". Best free research site on the web. Thousands of posts per day. Little did we know that their "available forever" would mean as READ ONLY, blocking all new posts, in an attempt to push members to the very expensive Ancestry site. Then features began disappearing, now old posts have disappeared.
Genealogy.com went the same route. Though GenForum posts are "preserved" by Genealogy.com as read-only for now, that could change on a whim when people see enough $$$$ flashed before their eyes. GenForum was shut down in a similar way as Rootsweb.
From the internet:
Genealogy.com is a source for family history buffs to find genealogical research originally posted in GenForum and our most popular genealogy articles. Start a search or browse below to start digging into your family's past!
What changed with Genealogy.com?
As of September 30, 2014 all member log-in functionality and the following pages were retired and are no longer accessible: MyAccount, MyGenealogy, My Home Pages, HeritageQuest (ProQuest) content; Virtual Cemetery; Outdated and less popular help articles; and Shop.
GenForum message boards, Family Tree Maker homepages, and the most popular articles remain available in a read-only format on Genealogy.com, meaning the pages are preserved to allow you to view, but not edit information.
Their goal is to remove all the free genealogy sites from the internet, so that only the expensive paid sites are available. Then they can tell everyone how popular they are!
