Worst Mergers And Acquisitions In Tech History

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Normally I'm not really a big fan of lists like this because they always seem to leave out obvious choices. Having said that, ZDNet did a pretty good job coming up with a list of "worst ever" mergers and acquisitions. :cool:

While it's too early to tell whether two recent technology mergers -- Dell & EMC and Western Digital & SanDisk -- will lead to long-term bliss, the industry has suffered its share of disastrous marriages. Here are the worst of the worst.
 
I'll add one I was stuck in the middle of back in 1998

Inacom & Vanstar

They eventually sold the distribution side of the business to Compaq in early 2000
(Compaq never recovered and was eventually was bought by HP)

The disaster ended in mid 2000 with a chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and everyone being laid off with no notice, no insurance, etc.

Lucky, my boss worked for the distribution side, so I had a job for a few months and received a nice severance package from Compaq.
 
Seeing the name "Ashton-Tate" again jarred some memory cells loose. Haven't seen that name in decades.
 
I totally missed the story about Autonomy cooking their books. No wonder HP is doing so poorly. Wow.
 
I think the DELL/EMC will work out for DELL simply because they need it to diversify.

The Sandisk/WD will likely be fine as it's pretty much WD adding SD to handle their digital storage line. Although it remains to be seen if the consumers lose out - Historically, SanDisk has built their brand on quality control. We'll see if WD does anything to hinder that (improve margins).
 
Stoly said:
AMD-ATI
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I agree. They were preoccupied with a merger while Intel and nVidia were releasing the Core 2 and Geforce 8800, two of the most revolutionary computing products of all time. They've never really recovered.
 
It's a strange one, because at this point it looks like the best plausible outcome is for ATI to get spun back off to be productive on its own, while the core AMD business is left to die.

Anyone have any idea how often the acquired company is the one that survives?
 
No AOL/TW mention yet? Or does that fall more into entertainment than tech?
 
Spidey329 said:
I think the DELL/EMC will work out for DELL simply because they need it to diversify.

The Sandisk/WD will likely be fine as it's pretty much WD adding SD to handle their digital storage line. Although it remains to be seen if the consumers lose out - Historically, SanDisk has built their brand on quality control. We'll see if WD does anything to hinder that (improve margins).
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well they haven't messed up HGST yet (fingers crossed)

hardware_failure said:
It was already mentioned in the article.

RIP Nortel, I miss you :,(
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meh, I do and don't... I miss Bay Networks but most of those guys went on to make Netgear after the Nortel buyout... and their phone guys went to make Aastra
 
Maybe I am biased, having been a Motorola employee before and through the Google merger, but this article appears to entirely misrepresent the series of events. We stripped Android down to the purest version we could and turned around system updates faster than any other device manufacturer. That is a mater of record.

Failing to innovate? How about the Voice features that Google and Samsung could not wait to get their hands on. The low powered sensor hardware which enabled gesture activations and display updates. How about the first actually round smart watch?

We did a lot of great work at that time, but packaged it in products that we put no effort into making people care about.

It was a tough time to work through and I wish many things had happened differently, but this article is entirely off the mark in my opinion.
 
Dunnlang said:
Maybe I am biased, having been a Motorola employee before and through the Google merger, but this article appears to entirely misrepresent the series of events. We stripped Android down to the purest version we could and turned around system updates faster than any other device manufacturer. That is a mater of record.

Failing to innovate? How about the Voice features that Google and Samsung could not wait to get their hands on. The low powered sensor hardware which enabled gesture activations and display updates. How about the first actually round smart watch?

We did a lot of great work at that time, but packaged it in products that we put no effort into making people care about.

It was a tough time to work through and I wish many things had happened differently, but this article is entirely off the mark in my opinion.
Click to expand...

The big thing with the updates was that Motorola perception wise was a second rate phone option at Sprint, ATT, and TMobile. No effort to advertise, only one or two display pieces, basically on level with LG or Nokia. Yet they got a lot of attention at Verizon. But Verizon still kept the phones bloated up a bit. Specially the heavily advertised "Droids". When I got my current phone (Nexus 6), I went in really thinking about a Turbo. But 6 months after KitKat, no update and no estimate. Most of that is on Verizon, but most people don't see that, instead they see that the most marketed Motorola phone still doesn't have the new update. I decided there that if I am getting a Android phone I am not taking chances again. Nexus for forever.

The other problem is the lack of Nexus phone. The 6 doesn't even really count as Google only went to them because they had run out of options and needed something quick. It also was too late by then. For three years they had a phone arm that was struggling to right itself, was still respected by the community, and would have been a perfect fit for the Nexus options. Instead it was Samsung, LG twice, and then finally Motorola. When they finally did Motorola basically had to enlarge their X to hit production dates because Google came back to them late in development window. The 6 while a great phone suffers from this specially in price almost doubling up on the standard price a Nexus had normally gone for. The probably did it for the same reason it took nearly a decade for MS to get tired of the sorry state of PC manufacturing to do their own PC's (not wanting to piss off the other phone guys).

As for the innovation. Motorola was probably the most innovative of all the phone companies, but they never did anything "sexy". No screens on the edges, no rapper audio, face time. That jumped first on lots of stuff, but always included it in practical and smart way. Smart is barely ever sexy. In a console biz you would say that they never had a killer app.
 
Hard to really beat Microsoft / Nokia for the "worst" title.
 
DPI said:
Hard to really beat Microsoft / Nokia for the "worst" title.
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AOL and TimeWarner. HP and Compaq. Both of those practically caused both companies to completely self destruct. HP and Compaq went from #1 and #3 brands to being combined into #4 within a couple years. AOL purchasing TimeWarner almost killed TimeWarner once AOL started floundering in a year, basically causing all the TW guys to force a spin off TW. Though AOL came out of it with so little overhead that they could sustain for nearly a decade till Verizon bought them.

Those are much worse than MS buying Nokia in a desperate attempt to keep at least foothold in the handheld market. It's still working for them. They are still barely in the market. Mobile is something MS has to have presence in going forward and without that purchase they pretty much would have had to pack their bags. It wasn't worth 7 billion, but honestly, just being in the market is probably worth it to them. Just look at the Xbox and the 360. It took them a decade to make a profit off of that venture. But it was worth it just for the mindshare they generate with it.
 
Also concerning the Sun-Oracle deal. This was still way better then the crazy idea of former CEO Jonathan Swartz (Maybe the worst CEO of all Time), to sell Sun to IBM. Basically for IBM to take what IP they wanted and then discard everything else. I've worked with numerous folks who have had the pleasure of going through IBM aquistions (disposal).
 
Topweasel said:
The big thing with the updates was that Motorola perception wise was a second rate phone option at Sprint, ATT, and TMobile. No effort to advertise, only one or two display pieces, basically on level with LG or Nokia. Yet they got a lot of attention at Verizon. But Verizon still kept the phones bloated up a bit. Specially the heavily advertised "Droids". When I got my current phone (Nexus 6), I went in really thinking about a Turbo. But 6 months after KitKat, no update and no estimate. Most of that is on Verizon, but most people don't see that, instead they see that the most marketed Motorola phone still doesn't have the new update. I decided there that if I am getting a Android phone I am not taking chances again. Nexus for forever.

The other problem is the lack of Nexus phone. The 6 doesn't even really count as Google only went to them because they had run out of options and needed something quick. It also was too late by then. For three years they had a phone arm that was struggling to right itself, was still respected by the community, and would have been a perfect fit for the Nexus options. Instead it was Samsung, LG twice, and then finally Motorola. When they finally did Motorola basically had to enlarge their X to hit production dates because Google came back to them late in development window. The 6 while a great phone suffers from this specially in price almost doubling up on the standard price a Nexus had normally gone for. The probably did it for the same reason it took nearly a decade for MS to get tired of the sorry state of PC manufacturing to do their own PC's (not wanting to piss off the other phone guys).

As for the innovation. Motorola was probably the most innovative of all the phone companies, but they never did anything "sexy". No screens on the edges, no rapper audio, face time. That jumped first on lots of stuff, but always included it in practical and smart way. Smart is barely ever sexy. In a console biz you would say that they never had a killer app.
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Maybe you could go into journalism. Your reply is a much more balanced and closer representation of how I saw things. It's nice to know that I was not too close to things (possibly clouding my vision).

In my opinion, Google never really had much involvement in Motorola's products. When the deal first when through, the Moto X was all but ready to ship. The 2014 products probably had a little back and forth discussion of features at the top level, but before they were even close to shipping, Google had already made the decision to sell off Motorola.

I can tell you that it was frustrating to work on what, by all accounts, were great products, but never got any traction/attention due to lack of marketing and lack of that "sexy" you mention. By the time anyone gets around to finding out about all the great innovations, they are all old news and already knocked off in a Samsung phone.
 
I remember I had shares of AMD at ~$19 a share

then the merger

then the years of failure rolled on

then I gave up and sold them - lost my patience for them to turn around

then even more years of failure rolled on

but thankfully now I can just laugh at it

I dare any AMD fanboy to put their money where their mouth is - go invest in the company and come back to tell me how proud you are to be an AMD fan. The company is a complete joke
 
drescherjm said:
That was by far the worst I can remember. AMD paid over 5 billion dollars for ATI and now the combined company is worth less than 1/2 of that.
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You say that, but would AMD even still be alive if they didn't have their integrated GPU solutions?
 
DocSavage said:
You say that, but would AMD even still be alive if they didn't have their integrated GPU solutions?
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The GPU division has been keeping them alive in the past few years however I say it was also the main cause for them getting into the current financial situation. They paid way way too much for ATI.
 
Topweasel said:
The big thing with the updates was that Motorola perception wise was a second rate phone option at Sprint, ATT, and TMobile. No effort to advertise, only one or two display pieces, basically on level with LG or Nokia. Yet they got a lot of attention at Verizon. But Verizon still kept the phones bloated up a bit. Specially the heavily advertised "Droids". When I got my current phone (Nexus 6), I went in really thinking about a Turbo. But 6 months after KitKat, no update and no estimate. Most of that is on Verizon, but most people don't see that, instead they see that the most marketed Motorola phone still doesn't have the new update. I decided there that if I am getting a Android phone I am not taking chances again. Nexus for forever.
Click to expand...

I would pin Android as the failure of Motorola for the people I know. As you stated, everyone who was with Verizon probably got one of the Droid phones. We switched from Nextel over to VZW and I had to give up my bullet proof i560 for a Droid 2. Loved the slider keyboard, but lots of OS problems. We had dozens of those phones and I constantly had to help people fix issues with them. You don't even want to know how clunky it was to try to take and sync an outlook calendar to Google so it would show up on the phone. Something that only required a quick plug in on the Blackberry that people previously had. Slowly but surely, everyone has converted over to an iPhone. I don't think a single one of them came back to Moto or Android, so it's difficult to have repeat customers that way.
 
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