One of my two or three readers sent me a link to “Acquisition: The Elephant in the Meeting Room.” I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other about Mongoose, the write up, or the enterprise search sector. I have identified some of the buzzwords used to dance around the little-discussed problem of lousy enterprise search systems. If you want to catch up on the obfuscation in which marketers and “real” consultants are entangled, you may find “Search Silver Bullets, Elixirs, and Magic Potions: Thinking about Findability in 2012” a thought starter.
The main point of the Elephant article, it seems to me, is summarized in this passage:
Should you be wary of acquisitions? Not as much as you might read in the blogs and professional communities.
The write up mentions a number of high profile acquisitions and provides some color for the reasons behind the deals. My view of some of the recent deals is different from the Mongoose write up. I suppose that at age 67, I have been watching and participating in the sale of large and small companies. I learned in my work at Booz, Allen & Hamilton before it became an azure chip firm, that the reasons for a corporate action are often difficult to discern from the outside looking in.
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