Mergers
Seems to be a good time for mergers. IBM's deal with Lenovo to sell it's PC Division is only the tip of the restructuring iceberg in the past few weeks.
AT&T Wireless and Cingular are all done getting married, essentially, but I can't use some features without switching over to Cingular. Recently we find that Sprint and Nextel are getting together to make a strong #3.
Oracle finally completed its buyout of Peoplesoft. That will continue Oracle's love/hate relationship with ISVs. How can any company be so mean to its partners, even aggressively competing with them, and yet Oracle is the #1 database on Unix and Windows? It has always mystified me, and I always thought Informix should have wiped the floor with them.
Symantec has announced that it will merge with Veritas, making for another interesting combination. Symantec is quite diversified although it is primarily known for Antivirus and Firewall software. One should not forget its development environments and other initiatives. I remember the good old days of Peter Norton, so perhaps I'm a dinosaur. Even so, adding storage management software to the mix will be interesting.
Finally, Time Warner is still with the disasterous merger with AOL, getting ready to fix a lot of financial statements.
What's the bottom line? I suspect I have lots of recent history to go over as we study valuation as part of my Finance class next quarter.
Josh Poulson
Posted Wednesday, Dec 15 2004 01:11 PM
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