Has there ever been a Tech merger/acquisition that was an unqualified success ?inactionman wrote: Fri Mar 22, 2024 9:45 am In a previous life I was interested in tools to capture and represent engineering information, and I remember looking into the tools Autonomy were putting together. These always seemed to promise a lot but actually do very little, in the rare cases I saw it used.
It turns out that it probably always just do very little, and the clusterfuck purchase by HP made Mike Lynch a very rich boy but left HP with a bit of a pup on their hands.
Allegedly Lynch and Autonomy employed some pretty cheeky accounting practices, and although HP really didn't do their due diligence there is a lot of talk about fraudulent reporting to up the sale price (e.g. counting RFPs a sales).
Anyway, 13 years later, the case finally comes to trial, and allegations of a lot more shady behaviour is coming out of woodwork.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... y-software
Might be of interest to anyone in IT.
I worked 20+ years at Intel, & I can't think of one that wasn't dogshit.
To be fair, Intel management had a particular skill at destroying any value in the companies they bought, by insisting that the company employees immediately adopt the Intel practices, despite these same practices being why the smaller company succeeded & developed the tech Intel wanted, while the much bigger company failed, & failed again.
Managers bang on about a companies, "culture", without ever taking onboard what that means, & why it makes companies different, & why trying to glue together two cultures is almost inevitably going to fuck one of them up.
I remember watching the HP/Autonomy thing at the time, & the comments in the Regs articles told the HP management all they needed to know, but the management of the time was dog awful, & had been for years, but they were working thru the playbook of failed tech "leaders"
