I think what you are after is the opportunity cost. Chasing an acquisition means integrating that acquisition into your current environment which generally means a culture clash. The people from the acquisition are the leadership and the rank and file. The leadership, if they have any sense at all, will be looking for the exits as soon as the deal closes because the chances they will be replaced are high if only because the powerbases in the new company will want them gone. The rank and file will probably be anxious and they too will be looking for the exits since they didn't grow into the acquirers way of doing things and figure they too will be on the chopping block as soon as the acquiring company can see fit to do without them. The steady attrition will mean the institutional memory will go bye-bye. After that is only left the technology. But if the technology was so good, they wouldn't have wanted to be acquired in the first place, which points to another problem: the deal is probably a lemon because a vibrant, growing company should not be wanting to see itself sold...unless the insiders know something isn't working correctly.

Also, if it isn't a good fit, you will waste years figuring that out when you should have spent those years on a better investment....such as in-house research to serve your core markets, etc.

Yes, let's take this attitude toward getting beaned by an asteroid. "Wot?" you say. "But..but...given enough lead time, there is something we can do about it...y'know...rockets, colored paint, solar sails, nuclear weapons." Oh, you wish to rely on human ingenuity. Yep, I agree. Let's rely on human ingenuity to reduce our contribution to the problem and reverse the problem should those naughty volcanoes start spewing CO2, political theories (another cause of global warming), etc.
 

Yes, but that 60% figure is not comparable. That represented a lot uncertainty over whether continents could move because it was very hard to catch them in the act. It took a lot of painstaking work. Well, we now have a lot of painstaking work on climate science, and the conclusions so far are that humans cause a lot of CO2 to get dumped into the atmosphere and that causes the temperature to warm.

Don't believe the temperature is warming? Let's ask the fish. It turns out that over the last 10-20 years, a lot of fish have determined the tropics were too hot and are moving to cooler water. So much so that it is changing the fishing industry, they are taking it seriously.

Still don't believe it is a problem? Let's ask the tropical coral, the ones still alive because the oceans are becoming more acidic due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

I wonder who put all that CO2 in the atmosphere. Maybe you could get back to us on that?

Oh slashdot, no one can hear you scream...or at least they really do not know who you are.

Easy. The earth's temperature is controlled by more than carbon. The sun's output, the amount volcanic ash and gases, positions of the continents. So how do we know that the global warming is caused by carbon dioxide. Easy. It is caused by CO2 and all the other things. How do we know this? We have physicists and chemists who we pay to study it. They are generally quite effective at producing verifiable results. When all the other things are equal, and you raise CO2, then it being a heat trapping gas, the laws of thermodynamics say we get an increase in temperature.

Ah, but who says the other things are being constant? No one. They change too, but they can also change in a direction we'd rather they didn't. So all in all, we're left with controlling the things we can control and hoping for the Flying Spaghetti Monster to control the rest.

You on the other hand are feeling lucky....huh....punk?

Just to be fair, that wasn't only the bankers. That was the real estate agents, the builders, Wall Street, government agencies, credit rating agencies, house appraisers, and last but not least, the sainted American People who mortgaged second houses, flipped houses, signed on the dotted line for adjustable rate mortgages because they were too stupid to relax, read, and live within their means.

" Suppose you built tens of billions of dollars worth of hospitals, which is a lot of hospitals by any measure, as well as the infrastructure to set up medical schools. Suddenly you've not only created a promising new career avenue, you've also made the nation healthier and, as a consequence, more productive, and as a consequence, raised their incomes."

Not really. If you have no demand for all those extra hospitals, then you have essentially wasted capital. And if people went to med school to work in those hospitals, they are SOL because there will be no jobs waiting for them.

China is suffering from this same sort of mentality. They built all kinds of infrastructure that only managed to give them a housing boom and now it is busting. A similar thing happened in the U.S. when demand was artificially created, couldn't be maintained, crashed, and almost took out the entire U.S. economy in the process.

I'm not against public investment, it is necessary. However, it cannot be done without an eye on a return on that investment. Otherwise, it is just warping the economy and creates bigger problems than it was intended to solve.

But at the time, Intel didn't have a mobile processor that sipped energy like ARM's. So what was he going to offer? License ARM...again? Maybe the data told him his processors were dead fish for mobile and that he'd be better off waiting until Intel could catch up.

There's no "gem of free-market-capitalism" here. It is simply what happens with politician meets money.

The problems the fellow mentioned are not caused by marketers. They are caused by a management culture that came out of the pointed little head of Bill Gates. He more or less built a disfunctional company because he didn't know how to manage. Ballmer is similar in that respect; when he took over the reins and didn't realize the problems this fellow mentioned and failed to fix them if he did, then it is as much his fault as Gates.

Nice channeling of Douglas Adams.

"Apple would just as soon see OS X die in favor of iOS", and your basis for claiming this is what, exactly?

Hmmm.....

Dunkirk: Apple, you have no idea what you are doing and are heading for perdition.

Cook: What do you suggest?

Dunkirk: License your OS, I'll bet you blow MS out of the water and rule the world.

Cook: I know what you think, now please tell me why you think it?

Dunkirk: Well, I just know.

Cook: How much more money will we make, in precise dollar filgures?

Dunkirk: It just will 'cause you'll sell more software.

Cook: We're a hardware company.

Dunkirk: But you could be software company and clean MS's clock.

Cook: Could someone please remove this Dunkirk fellow from my office?

This from the guy who wrote "What with basically every government agency spending their entire budget surplus on ammo (including agencies like the SSA and IRS that don't even have guns to put it in)...."

Really? You need to either start or stop smoking something.

Enterprise Risk Management...i.e., a computerized way to cover one's management nakedness so the stockholders and lenders don't find out how clueless management really is.