Cisco has a very different M&A strategy than Google. They add product lines through acquisition, in preference to building internally (if you're on a Cisco team and you're ever given an MRD for a product, the joke goes, quit and start a company to do it instead). As often as not, Google acquires companies to absorb the people. Google typically buys much smaller companies, and more selectively.

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. :)

"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...

I would argue that Google and Motorola never "merged".

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.

What does "MRD" stand for? I've been searching for a definition but I can't seem to find any, that makes sense in this context.

Given the context, I guess it's some kind of product development order?

Market Research (or Requirements) Document

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.

It'd be more accurate to say that MRDs are an artifact of waterfall design. Waterfall is out of fashion, and so small companies tend not to use it, but if you're shipping hardware (like Cisco does) it's often more natural than agile.

Marketing requirements document; the set of features for the next release of a product.

Disclaimer: I have worked for Cisco, and no longer do so.

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.