Symantec Corp., the top global security software maker, on Thursday said it will buy Veritas Software Corp for $13.5 billion, expanding into the data storage and recovery business. More can be found just about everywhere.
Symantec to Buy Veritas
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Adam Scheinberg
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Of just buying new technology instead of doing any real innovation, but it would seem as though, for better or worse, this is the norm in the corporate world. If you want to expand into a new area of business, instead of doing the work yourself, just find somebody who’s already doing it and buy them. I suppose this is actually a smart way of doing things, but it also makes the corporations like parasites(?) .. they just keep getting bigger and bigger, swallowing up smaller companies as they go. Even the Nextel and Sprint deal – I would imagine the mergers/buyouts will continue until we are left with only one cell phone carrier.
Of just buying new technology instead of doing any real innovation, but it would seem as though, for better or worse, this is the norm in the corporate world
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buying a company isnt contradictory to innovation. the difference is that nearly all of MS core technologies have traditionally been brought out and extended while other companies do that to extend into new markets. of course this is a generalised statement and there are instances where things have been different.
I just saw an ad for Symantec’s new bare metal restore software. This seems to be a case of buying marketshare. I wonder which program they’ll thrash – their own or veritas’.
Symantec been nowhere near close to being a security software maker? Did I miss something?
Yeah. But at the same time, getting a big corp behind a technology can push it to the masses.
The worst part about this is the CEO culture is perpetuates. People build companies, bring in their corporate lackies, and then just sell the company and make their money. You really have to be there to see it in action
it’s not a pretty site. But that’s another issue…
Yamin
[quote]Yeah. But at the same time, getting a big corp behind a technology can push it to the masses.[/quote]
If technologies work anything like software, it usually starts out as a niche product that totally rocks, and is being used by a handful of users. Then the company that developed it gets slurped by a corporation, who then proceeds to ruin that said product (*cough* ICQ *cough*)
I am pretty depressed that Adobe got their grubby paws on CoolEdit .. hopefully they won’t totally destroy it
Symantec been nowhere near close to being a security software maker? Did I miss something?
Probably they’re referring to the products Symantec got when buying Norton (Antivirus and Firewall among others)
Veritas has some kick ass products, namely VxFS (Veritas Filesystem, the defacto production filesystem on Sun boxen), VxVM (Volume Manager) and their backup solution. And now they’re being purchased by a toy manufacturer (read: symantec makes piss poor quality software for Windows shitheads). Very very sad.
I agree with you Darius to an extent. It is easier to acquire a company that to build one from scratch. In essence, why re-invent the wheele.
Acquisitions are not always a “bad thing” TM. They usually turn out to be a bad thing. You have a network of people, tehchnologies and so forth that exist. The challenge is intergrating them into another model. What large companies realize, the two models shouldn’t always be merged. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that it should be done.
I personally have worked on several intergration projects and asked myself, why on earth would someone want to break a perfectly functional model? It usually turns out, that someone in the corporate food chain wants to build their empire and prove something to someone. And in the end, it turns out to be disasterous.
To summarize:
1) Acuquistions aren’t bad (for the right reason)
2) Intergration isn’t bad (for the right reason)
Companies evolve with certain forms and functions, sometimes forms ditactes function and in other cases, function ditactes form. Expanding a product line vertically or horizontally can be a good thing. But to re-engineer a corporate culture can be a very bad thing (if you don’t know what your doing). And as for companies that specialize in “intergration”, run away, run far away. They typically know less than the boss’ that hire them.
They usually work. If not, ask Apple.
Buying “marketshare”, “zero innovation”, how the hell are they doing such things when there are no over laps between the businesses? both businesses are focused in difference areas that are closely related.
Why go out and develop something from scratch when an alliance between two companies can produce a better outcome?
Geeze, it sounds like that there are alot of people here suffering from the Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome.
Damn there are some uneducated posts on here.
Symantec make a lot of great Security products.
Check the web site:
http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/content/productlink.cfm
Hello Bueller, Bueller….anyone….