Do Mergers & Acquisitions Kill Products?
Often, the most daring, cutting-edge product innovation comes from startups and other small companies. Driven more by passion than profit and with little to lose, these companies take chances that larger, established enterprises can t. Once the technology is incubated at the startup level and starts to establish itself as a viable solution for an existing problem, though, those larger, established enterprises tend to snatch up the small, cutting-edge startup through mergers and acquisitions so they can incorporate the technology into their own product offerings. Frequently, however, the brain trust and passion that developed the technology, the employees of the smaller company, are swept aside, and the net result is that the technology becomes a mere shell of what it once was or what it potentially could have been. Sonny Discini, senior network security engineer for the Montgomery County Government in Maryland, says, Some big players attempted to buy the best point solutions and then b
