Sometimes they don't want the product at all (or the employees). Rather, they're buying customers. I worked for a company that wrote logistics software and we

Sometimes they don't want the product at all (or the employees). Rather, they're buying customers. I worked for a company that wrote logistics software and we got bought out by a much larger company. They stopped all new development on the product, laid off half the developers, and had the other half working on tools to transition customers from what had been our product to theirs. Tax law used to facilitate this kind of thing, too, because of goodwill writedowns. Might still be true - I don't know.