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>"Dropbox did not buy Mailbox based on a couple of Techcrunch posts, and they obviously will have done their due diligence before purchasing the company." I li
by tatsuke95 14y ago
>"Dropbox did not buy Mailbox based on a couple of Techcrunch posts, and they obviously will have done their due diligence before purchasing the company."
I like Dropbox. But recent history is filled with terrible acquisitions that have you wondering what the lawyers and accountants were doing:
Ebay buying Skype.
Microsoft buying Danger.
Microsoft buying aQuantive.
Anyone investing in Color.
AOL buying Time Warner.
Yahoo! buying Geocities.
and these were all huge deals I can think of off the top of my head. The number of small ones is, I'm sure, substantially larger.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThe lawyers and accountants were doing overtime, those are all billable hours. But to make the argument that something is "bad" you really have to know what management had in mind for it. If their goal was go "make it go away" then what looks like "bad" on the outside can be "good" on the inside. If their goal was to get a team to build something they didn't yet have a team that could build, it might also be "good" in a way you and I couldn't see.
- tatsuke95 14y ago>"But to make the argument that something is "bad" you really have to know what management had in mind for it." What they hand in mind is irrelevant to me. All I care about is the outcome. Saying Microsoft bought aQuantive with the hopes to cure cancer in their mind doesn't justify a $6BB write down. It would still be bad.
- tatsuke95 14y agoAccording to Damodaran's corporate finance class, 60% of acquisitions fail in some for or another.