Microsoft’s $6.2 Billion Writedown

This article in the Daily Beast (Microsoft’s $6.2 Billion Writedown Shows It’s Losing War With Google - The Daily Beast) is one of many that are a just cause for scharden freude for a number of people I know personally, member of aQuantive when it was bought out.

I can't recall, however, any article talking about the main reason the purchase failed.

There is talk about changing markets, etc, but from the evidence I have seen the reason was simple: Microsoft management system. 

After the acquisition, upper management paid little attention to the integration.

Of course, the new people were moved about and cherry picked needlessly, but the biggest damage was in how the acquisitions organizational structure -- which seemed to work -- was abandoned in favor of Microsoft's.

This entailed destroying the identity of the acquisition and its products through division and by housing its members in various existing Microsoft's divisions that had been in the same field .

This meant putting the acquired people and technology with, and generally under the direction of those people who had failed to produce a competitive product in the first place. So the technology was diluted and trashed.

This is absolutely the norm at Microsoft -- and though they may have worse management than most companies -- common in acquisitions.


I would be interesting in knowing why this is not being discussed in the press about the write down.