Standard & Poor's gives Google the U.S. debt treatment

Re:Standard & Poor's gives Google the U.S. debt treatment by nl on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @03:09AM (#2894434)

Large integrations have worked at times in the past mostly when one company bought a competitor (or semi-competitor) for its market share. Generally they haven't been great for employees of the company that was taken over, though.

Some examples include: DEC/Digital (bought by Compaq), Netscape Server business (bought by Sun at the same time AOL bought the rest of the company), Compaq (bought by HP), Lotus (bought by IBM in a hostile takeover), Peoplesoft (hostile takeover by Oracle), BEA System (bought by Oracle), Sun (bought by Oracle).

There are also numerous examples in the telecommunications market.

The Oracle/Sun deal is the most interesting in this context, because it is a software company taking over a hardware company (yes, Sun has software, but one of the reasons Oracle bought it was to compete with HP & IBM on complete system integration all the way down to hardware).

It's clear there are plenty of examples where this didn't work. Google has a huge challenge, but there are some precedents for this working.

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Re:Standard & Poor's gives Google the U.S. debt treatment by stonemetal on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @07:48AM (#2894943)

May be we have different ideas of what constitutes working out well, I wouldn't have considered the subsequent failure and acquisition of Compaq and Sun to be good outcomes.

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Re:Standard & Poor's gives Google the U.S. debt treatment by nl on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @08:09AM (#2894981)

subsequent failure and acquisition of Compaq and Sun to be good outcomes

I don't understand what you mean. Compaq and Sun were struggling prior to being taken over, not afterwards.

I'm more familiar with the case of Sun, but in that case some kind of take over was what all the shareholders were hoping for. The employees and many in the tech industry might have preferred a different buyer.

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Re:Standard & Poor's gives Google the U.S. debt treatment by stonemetal on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @09:59AM (#2895356)

Compaq bought DEC, got into trouble and got bought by HP. It was a fairly short time line between rescuing DEC and needing their own rescue. How is that a good out come? I am not saying buying DEC brought them down but it certainly didn't save them from impending doom.

As far as Sun goes there is a much longer time line between the Netscape purchase and there own, but the way Sun fell apart until its eventual purchase isn't what I would call a paragon of success.

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