That's the face of it. Labor is a market as well. The impacts of these arrangements on our labor pool is extraordinary. It's a massive displaced cost of allowing these types of mergers to occur born out by the people who stand to gain the least from the merging of business assets.

It was just senseless, Intel doesn't have real or imagined competition from a drone company, it wasn't even close to being in the same market. They just believed the hype about drones being the next big thing and when they found out they were too early they decided they didn't have the patience to wait for drones to become a thing and they killed it. There was no long term vision behind it.

EDIT I just noticed the “inspection” part. Maybe they wanted good zoom to spy on the tenants? (Or maybe that’s a really uncharitable take).

I don't know about "real estate inspection", but another use case was for them to be used in oil rigs in the North Sea to inspect the structure of the rig itself. They had to be self-stabilizing under high winds and adverse weather conditions, and they had to carry a good enough camera to take detailed photos.

Unfortunately, while the technology was there, the market wasn't. Not many wanted to get a $35K drone to be able to sustain this business.

In real estate inspection, we had the same sort of concerns, can't fly too close to the object for safety reasons, and we need high resolution photos to determine quality of the masonry, paintwork and roofing etc..

It seems like a low risk effort to put a promising inexperienced exec in charge of a recent acquisition.

If they're a screw up and run it into the ground, imagine how much damage they could have done in a megacorp position of power.

Megacorp saved (at the cost of a smaller company)