Acquisition Horrors: HP Takes Top Spot
November 3, 2015
I read “Horror Show: Worst Mergers and Acquisitions in Tech History.” I like these categorical affirmatives. You know. All men are mortal, etc.
The write up identifies some MBA plays that jumped the tracks. The list of flops include:
- Caldera and SCO (a Unix mash up)
- Palm and HP (a number of other players too)
- Oracle and Sun Micro (yep, commodity hardware will go nowhere)
- America Online and Time Warner (still amazing after all those years)
- HP and Compaq (yikes, HP again)
- Northern Telecom and Bay Networks (clever Canadians)
- Microsoft and Danger (how is that mobile phone business working out, Microsoft?)
- Borland and Ashton Tate (a gem)
- Novell and Unix (Utah antics)
- MySpace and News Corp. (real journalism in action)
- Google and Motorola (ah, the good old days of informed reasoning)
- Zynga and OMGPOP (bankers love this type of deal)
- HP and Autonomy (yikes, again).
- Facebook and Instagram (planning is us)
- Apple and Lala (the beat goes on)
- Cisco and Linksys (dear, old Cisco)
- Nokia and Microsoft (how is that mobile phone business working out, Microsoft?)
These 17 mini cases are interesting to me because one company makes the list three times. HP and Palm, HP and Compaq, and HP and Autonomy.
Some of these other case examples are spectacular; for example, the Google Motorola tie up.
But for a single company to make the list three times says quite a bit about the management teams at HP over the years of these deals.
Stellar achievement, HP. And a tip of the hat to the analyst who seems to have recycled an MBA study group project for the article.
Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2015
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