All posts tagged ‘mergers’
by Nick Carr, Blogger, Rough Type
Oracle has enjoyed considerable success by rolling up the software side of the the now-mature client-server model of corporate computing. With its $13.9 billion acquisition of sluggish outsourcing giant EDS, Hewlett-Packard is playing the same game on the services side. It’s buying vast tracts of data-center space in which run the computers and other IT machinery that power the operations of lots of large companies and government agencies. The addition of EDS more than doubles the size of HP’s services business, giving it a scale closer to that of the leading IT outsourcing company, IBM.
Read the rest of this post
by Grant McCracken, Blogger, Cultureby.com
I was talking to Mary Walker, a Silicon Valley-based anthropologist, about the proposed deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, and we were wondering how such a deal would work itself out. Mergers and acquisitions are fraught with difficulty, and Mary was pointing out that the failure rate is sometimes as high as 60%. And this is after tough minded MBAs have examined the deal with their own particularly sophisticated, sighted, numerate version of due diligence. When things go bad in a merger or an acquisition, the problem is sometimes not with the mechanics, not with the infrastructure of the deal. The problem is with the superstructure of the deal, the ideas, practices and cultures that must now be brought together for things to work. We are still inclined to suppose that mergers and acquisitions are straightforward, that the individuals who must now work together need merely resort to an instrumental logic to find common cause and a shared modus operandi. But of course the truth is often otherwise.
Read the rest of this post
