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Customers Question Tech Industry's Takeover Spree
crimeandpunishment writes:
"When it comes to the world's largest technology companies, is bigger better? Maybe for the companies, but maybe not for their customers. Tech companies, which have spent $350 billion buying other companies over the past few years, have marketed their acquisitions as beneficial for their customers, offering them a broader range of products, and making it easier for one-stop shopping. But changes in customer service may be offsetting any benefit. In the words of the chief information officer for a large association, 'When the smaller guys are gobbled up by bigger guys, in theory it's supposed to be better, but in our experience it's been worse.'"
When has anything a company has done been for your benefit?
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
If people really want this free-market capitalist monstrosity, then they need to accept the fact that what is best for the *company* always comes first. It really irritates me every time I hear people complaining that a corporation is not thinking of its customers first, or its employees... That is not a corporations job. They're one and only job is to make money for their shareholders.
If you don't like this--as you shouldn't--then the system itself is what needs to be changed. Don't blame the individual companies--they are doing exactly what we have set them up to do. Capitalism itself is the enemy.
Not so much the size as the MO of large IT companies. Create a shell of sales, marketing and consulting while all development, maintenance and support is hollowed out and internally "outsourced" to units in very cheap countries. Even though the quality of all three go down they manage to win bids by in theory offering the same as their competitors for less. In practice it turns out much worse than expect, but that's quickly forgotten during the next round of contracts again with a tight budget.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A small company that has a few clients is more likely to provide very good support, as opposed to a large company with many clients. While large companies support large companies well, due to their capacity to effect change at scale, this is not the case of large companies supporting smaller companies. Typically, while say an account manager at a small company might do several things to streamline the benefits that their client(s) see, this may not be the case with larger companies which rely on various processes to get things through the pipe and ultimately down the line to their clients. Everything at scale will fail. One only has to look at government to see that being everything to everyone will ultimately not work. If you require 10 people to sign-off on a PO as opposed to 1 person then it's clear which PO gets completed first. Friction is the enemy of performance and the friend of low tolerance.
Something like half of all mergers/acquisitions fail to generate the returns expected. In such cases, it's usually the shareholders of the company being bought that reap the benefit (assuming they can dump whatever stock of the acquiring company they receive as part of their payment).
Think about it. It's basically a coin flip that company A buying company B will result in any benefit to the shareholders of A. If shareholders were truly wise, they'd tell management to just give them the cash they would have spent on acquiring a company. They'd make out better in the long run.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908