This article is mistitled. It should read 'What happens after anyone acquires you'.
These anecdotes will sound familiar to many people who have been through an acquisition. Acquisitions are not something any company is naturally good at, and they inherently threaten the bureaucracy of the acquirer. Despite good intentions, the corporate immune system usually kills off the interloper before it becomes established. Not to mention that the founders and best employees usually bail within a couple of years.
It all boils down to the fact that scalability of an organization often is harder than scalability of a web site. Yahoo just happens to be a very good example of that.
As hackers we tend to focus a lot on technical scalability issues. We love to work on things like NoSQL, the CAP-theroem, large scale caching and whatnot. But I think that the organization often becomes the bottleneck quicker than the web site. This is especially true now when we have services like Amazon AWS and GAE which helps us with the technical scalability issues.
So next time you work on that really cool memory optimization maybe you should ask yourself if you don't get better scalability as a whole if you focus your limited programming resources on features instead (so you don't have to hire that extra programmer to do that for you, since you work on your memory optimization).
Perhaps 'anyone but Cisco'. There is a company that has more successfully than most integrated a number of companies into its structucture. Perhaps the most amazing (for me at least) is Linksys, which I predicted would result in an epic failure and yet their market share, and competitiveness has recovered after the post acquisition noise.
I'd love to hear a Cisco Exec's opinion on their secret.
I used to work for Cisco at Linksys and this is far from truth. Although Linksys operated pretty much as their own division, Cisco EOLed a lot of successful Linksys products in the SMB market since they might compete with Cisco's. Also, Linksys had and still has a stronger brand presence among consumers which Cisco resented a bit. This led to a rather long brand transition that made things pretty difficult at Linksys' end. Lastly when Linksys needed the deep pockets of Cisco for breaking into new consumer product markets, Cisco was always hesitant despite successful market research and product development on Linksys' end.
Relatively, it's been better than most acquisitions but things are definitely not that rosy.
Interesting to hear from an insider. Cisco is very good at getting the media to write about how skilled they are with acquisitions. Do you think it's more marketing than reality?
Sad to say but they are better than most when it comes to acquisitions. I think that's more due to the fact that their acquisitions are usually strategically related to what they want to do.
The big exception has been Flip. Although they are a great company, their limelight was too short for a company like Cisco to get recurring growth over a long period with this push into the consumer space.
These anecdotes will sound familiar to many people who have been through an acquisition. Acquisitions are not something any company is naturally good at, and they inherently threaten the bureaucracy of the acquirer. Despite good intentions, the corporate immune system usually kills off the interloper before it becomes established. Not to mention that the founders and best employees usually bail within a couple of years.