There is a really nice chart in this article providing a timetable of company takeovers of other security software companies. Very useful.
It would have been interesting that in addition to confirming that AVG and Avast had identical results, that they also confirmed or denied that protection has improved after the takeover.
Yes, it was a nice chart. A couple of comments, M$ bought Giant but it didn't improve anything, it wasn't until they launched Win 10 when Win Defender became a serious contender. Of course this was only because they were trying to cross-sell Win Defender ATP to large companies. Sophos buying Invincea was interesting to me because of Sandboxie, but seems they wanted to get their hands on the AV part which was based on machine learning, it wasn't about sandboxing. That's why they also bought SurfRight, to add exploit protection. Intel buying McAfee was a huge mistake. And it was no surprise that companies like CarbonBlack, enSilo, Endgame and Cylance were all acquired, because the so called EDR security market is very lucrative. Although Cylance was a gamble because they didn't perform that well in the beginning, but I'm sure they have improved the product.
Then I guess you don't remember Microsoft Security Essentials being one of the best AVs in the industry during earlier windows versions.
AFAIK, it was one of the crappiest AV's in terms of protection and speed? I remember that it always scored low on AV tests, just like Malwarebytes back in the days.
2013 - Sandboxie Acquired by Invincea www.invincea.com/2013/12/invincea-announces-acquisition-of-sandboxie/