http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/hard-facts-mergers.htm...
'Cisco figured out that mergers between similar sized companies rarely work, as there are frequently struggles about which team will control the combined entity.'
I recall asking people there about why they didn't acquire certain companies that I thought would make a lot of sense from a technical / product perspective.
The typical answer was right in line with that quote - that Cisco stays away bigger companies that others might try to swallow at high cost.
That they look for logical acquisitions of specific products in the few hundred million dollar range, not billions.
Sure it is, there just happen to be exceptions.
Of the 21 years and 136 Cisco acquisitions with prices on Wikipedia, 14 come in over $1B. The average price overall is $530M, and the average price excluding >$1B deals with $178M.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...
I would be very surprised to discover that Google has acquired close to as many headcount as Cisco has. But I don't want to do the research work either. :)
In 2012 Google acquired Motorola Mobility with it's 20,000 employees.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2148219/Googl...
Google just bought out the patents of Motorola and dumped the company away to Lenovo afterwards. There was no merging, no redundant employee elimination process, like in other mergers.
Plus, this number is obviously a large outlier. An actual stats person would just go calculate the figures with the outlier removed- Cisco probably made much larger acquisitions, employee count-wise, than Google in that case.
Given the context, I guess it's some kind of product development order?
It's a document that's usually produced by a product management group in a company that outlines (very vague, almost laughably so) the "market requirements" - what users will want/need - for a given feature or set of features.
This is usually handed to developers/designers to come up with a "High Level Design" (HLD) that gives the "how" to the MRD's "what".
It's usually only seen in larger software companies.
Cisco is an engine for buying up small companies, digesting them, and extracting value from their products. It does not really do engineering or create its own product lines. As a result, it has polished the process of buying up companies, and progressively shutting them down while extracting the maximum sales value from the products that company has developed.
The key thing is that this is the core model of Cisco's entire business. It's actually not too rough on the people involved - the profits of the milking machine are shared fairly generously with the people being milked - but it is all about purchasing products with "potential future value" and converting it into cash, not creating new value.
Even if you are a high performer, being part of the now-controlled interest deals you something of the short stick, as they say.
If your company is acquired, be prepared to move on. Regardless of personal performance, they may give you no choice.
My understanding, primarily from friends at Cisco which has its own history of acquisitions and layoffs is that this is roughly standard procedure, catastrophe or not.
Basically, there's always going to be a lot of overlap when acquiring another large company. Loads of people are made completely redundant and things that didn't come out via diligence are discovered.
There's a wait and see period where some people leave, followed by jockeying for position and finally layoffs of people who remain redundant and/or lacked the awareness to pursue either of the former two options.
Obviously, a merger which doesn't pan out would amplify the effect.
What I wonder is how much such a process actually affects the success of these mergers? Do the consultants and banks who assist in these sort of things have a variable to account the back-biting scramble that will take place in each first year?