Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely. Once they hit the two-year mark and are free to leave, the founders take off. The sites are left to flounder or ride into the sunset. And customers are left holding the bag.

Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in March ‘05 for $35M

The Flickr announcement of the deal said, “We’ll be working with a bunch of people that Totally Get Flickr and want to preserve the community and the flavor of what is here. We’re going to grow and change, but we’re in it for the long haul, with the same management and same team.”

But in 2008, co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield both left the company. In 2009, many engineers from the service were laid off or left on their own.

Meanwhile, Facebook kept taking a growing share of photo traffic. Yahoo’s top executives barely mentioned Flickr publicly (and few of them actually have a public Flickr account). Decision-making at Flickr slowed because of bureaucracy. “We just missed some opportunities that we could have tried if we were independent and raised our own money,” Butterfield said. “Who knows what would have happened?” He said ideas to give more visibility to photos of breaking news and ideas for international expansion never got off the ground.

Ex-Flickr Architect Kellan Elliott-McCrea also blamed the Yahoo bureaucracy for slowing the Flickr team down. “Roughly 15% of any of the large projects they (we?) tackled over the last few years (internationalization, video, various growth strategies, etc) went into building the feature. 85% was spent dealing with Yahoo,” he said. According to a worklog he kept in 2008-2009, 18 meetings scheduled over a 9 month period discussed why Flickr’s API was poorly designed and when it’d be shut down and migrated to the YOS Web Services Standard. He said, “That kind of stuff slows you down. Especially when you’re being starved for resources.”

On the plus side, Yahoo says it’s still “absolutely committed” to Flickr. And Butterfield says that although Facebook is grabbing more mainstream photo sharers, Flickr continues to be the leader among photo enthusiasts.

Delicious was acquired by Yahoo in December ‘05 for $15-20M

Delicious’ Joshua Schachter announced the deal saying, “Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team – they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web.” Meanwhile, Yahoo promised “to give Delicious the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community.”

But then the app seemed to go stagnant. Traffic dropped. Schachter claims he was stripped of responsibilities and employees within a year after acquisition. “My boss didn’t agree with my technical design or product direction,” said Schacter. “It was phrased more like ‘you should be the idea guy, we’ll find other people to run engineering for you;’ the guy he decided would be good was ultimately him. However, he mostly spent all his time on Answers and none on Delicious, so it was more like absentee landlordism.”

Schacter left Yahoo when his contract was up, in June of 2008. “I was largely sidelined by the decisions of my management,” he said after leaving. “It was an incredibly frustrating experience.”

Recently, a leaked slide revealed Yahoo might be planning to “sunset” the app. Schachter vented, “[Yahoo!] killed a lot of good startups, wasted a lot of engineers’ time, etc. Perhaps I spent too much time inside that particular sausage factory. I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.”

MyBlogLog was acquired by Yahoo! in January ’07 for $10M

Upon acquisition, Chad Dickerson, senior director of Yahoo Developer Network, said, “We don’t plan on making any immediate changes to the MyBlogLog Web site, distribution or branding. We want to encourage and not disrupt the continued growth of the MyBlogLog community and foster the innovation that has already made MyBlogLog an indispensable part of [users’] lives.”