> Conglomerates being worth less than the sum of all parts is one of the stupidest parts of Wall Street. There is no actual rationale for this besides maybe it

> Conglomerates being worth less than the sum of all parts is one of the stupidest parts of Wall Street. There is no actual rationale for this besides maybe it being easier to evaluate a company doing only a single thing? One example: some parts of a business need a positive consumer reputation and others don't. When you connect these under the same company you may end up with two business units that are each less valuable than if they were free to take the approach that best suited their business. For example, an ad company that didn't care much what consumers thought about it would use fingerprinting to personalize ads and it's prevalent in the industry, but Google committed to not doing this. Why? My guess is that a big part was reputation: having an ads division that's tracking users with no opt out is inconsistent with the company-wide policies Google needs to be competitive in consumer markets. In this case I think the effects are positive, in that the display ads division is closer to what consumers would want than if it were independent, but I think it's pretty likely that spinning DoubleClick back out would increase overall profits. (I used to work at Google, and here I'm speculating about decisions made several levels above me that I wasn't a part of.)