Aside from the strategy failure case, I believe that Microsoft assumes that a large portion of the initial value will be lost in the first two years- 50% of the

Aside from the strategy failure case, I believe that Microsoft assumes that a large portion of the initial value will be lost in the first two years- 50% of the business is usually uninteresting to Microsoft and either shutdown or quite frequently re-sold, 50% of the employees either are not offered jobs with the transition, choose not to transition to MS, or leave quickly. Then very frequently a good chunk of the code needs to be re-written to get it working with the rest of Microsoft's stack. This doesn't mean that an acquisition is an automatic failure, just that it needs to drive more sales to become a success- either by direct sales or complementing other products. Know how to create a $200m business? Increase Windows sales by 1%. (steveb).