Love stinks: The worst mergers in the history of the technology industry
by Jason Perlow | February 11, 2012 5:46pm PST | Image 1 of 11
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Valentine's Day is here again, and love is in the air. Couples flirting, courting each other and forming relationships. And sometimes those relationships result in marriage.
In the tech world, much of the same types of things occur. And as with human relationships they also can end up in marriages -- also known as corporate mergers. Mergers can result in the two parts being stronger than the whole, or they can end in utter disaster.
Here are ten worst tech industry mergers that we've ever seen our sorry sights on. To quote the J. Geils Band in their 1980 Rock n' Roll hit, LOVE STINKS.
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Indeed, I think Groklaw pretty much started because of this debacle. Frankly, SCO's biggest blunder was this lawsuit. It's not worth bankrupting the company over a lawsuit.
"The Many Marriages of Palm"
Yeah, who knows what Palm was doing in its last years. Before it finally merged with HP, it went from a great company to one that released new products once in a blue moon.
Thankfully, by the time they went under smartphones became popular, and I moved myself to my iPod touch, and later iPhone. Today's smart phones have all of the PIM features the old Palm devices had.
And alas, HP was unable to save the already floundering Palm.
"Oracle & Sun"
Guess we'll find out. I was never so much interested in Sun's hardware as their software, and Java is still being actively developed.
"Total subscribers of AOL went from an estimated 30 million at the height of its popularity to less than just over 5 million in 2007, with no significant quarterly growth since 2002."
Dunno if that was the result of the merger so much as it was the result of broadband and the internet. AOL was a walled garden stuck in dialup.
"Hewlett Packard & Compaq & Digital Equipment Corporation"
Compaqs, oh I remember those - BSOD city. They crashed all the time.
"Nortel & Bay"
"After numerous efforts to restructure the company and financial mismanagement scandals over a period of about ten years, the company filed for Chapter 11 in January of 2009, and its various businesses were eventually liquidated."
And one of my relatives lost his job
But the negative experience with the Kin still taints its reputation not only with consumers but also with critical wireless carriers such as Verizon, who as of yet has refused to commit to selling more than one model of Windows Phone or an LTE version which puts it on par with its arsenal of Android devices
The vast majority of consumers have never heard of the KIN, so how can one have negative opinion of something that they have no knowledge of?
As for Verizon, there are issues on many levels, one is theirs, and Google's heavy investment into Android, as an early counter to the iPhone, something they passed on, so one can argue they do not make the best decisions when given the chance.
I feel the lack of a push on Verizon's end in reference to WP7 is an effort to "not upset the boat" in relations to Google at the moment.
The problem is that Verizon mandated data plan on what is essentially NOT a smartphone.
KIN would have done well to compete with feature phones.
Is it because of patent portfolios that acquiring companies purchase these outdated technologies or businesses?
Take a new technology, totally misunderstand what it is about, destroy the customer base by enforcing change without analyzing the likely effects, etc., etc.
One for the classroom of Business 101.
Well of course, Mr Murdoch was not used to "customers" creating their "own news". His model was that his empire created it, and the "customers" consumed it. Duh. Bad move Murdoch. Perhaps he should have got the company to bribe the police a bit more... Oh wait, that wouldn't have worked on MySpace either.
From the Oracle side, if the Java litigation is successful, Sun will have turned out to be rather a bargain for Oracle shareholders, no matter how badly the hardware business does. It will also serve as a warning to other firms that trying to use someone else's IP without paying for it can actually cost more in the long run than than paying for it up front. This is good for Oracle, the IT sector generally and all industries that rely on IP protection. It will be bad for Google, of course, but it was Google management's choice to gamble on not paying Sun for the Java IP Google allegedly used anyway.
dBase was never a hierarchical database. Rather it maintained a file-and-index catalog of tables which could be "related" and used in a "relational" manner using the dBase language. Eventually they added multiple-key indices, but it was never hierarchical. Foxbase and then FoxPro cloned both the architecture and the language, adding enhancements. The main enhancement they added was reliability. Ashton-Tate's memory model and software engineering left much to be desired. Fox moved it into the 20th century even before Microsoft lifted the 640kB memory barrier. Eventually MS bought Fox, rebranding it as Visual FoxPro, although retaining most of the old product. All the clones -- including Clipper, a compiled version -- shared two key features: support for the dBase file structure and support for most of the dBase language.
Eventually most xBASE vendors tried adding a SQL interface. But that didn't make any of the products any more or less relational. It only gave them a new language. And yet another software layer and its added bugs and latency.
of IT for years. Really an "anti-merger" -much of the competition was streets ahead of IBM (as was revealed in the "Telex" lawsuit).
But, hey-ho, Old Ma Bell (a private monopoly that cleverly kept itself going for years) (I'm old enough to remember the ads. in the Nat. Geog. it placed in the 1940's) delivered the goods. C, C++, the transistor, Unix / Linux etc.
Let's the fun begin.
abandoned their increases are welcome to visit our website. Accept cash or
credit card payments, free transport. You can try oh, will make you satisfied.
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"While this future device development was underway, in October 2009, Danger incurred a catastrophic data loss resulting in complete business continuity failure at one of its data centers which was hosting personal customer data used T-Mobile Sidekick product that eventually took two months to recover from." (Microsoft-Danger) This quote is not readable, it has some missing words. It might have been better to break it up into multiple sentences.
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Moto is going to bleed Google's cash like a cut on an artery of a person taking anticoagulants.
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