The world's largest technology companies have been on a buying spree, spending billions to snap up smaller companies. And often the buyers say they're doing it for their customers — businesses, hospitals, schools and government agencies.
As tech companies get bigger and bigger, they say, they can offer a broader variety of products and make it easier for their customers to do one-stop shopping.
Yet if you ask the customers, you hear a different story. Often they get new headaches with multibillion-dollar deals by the likes of Oracle, IBM, SAP, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. When you add the challenges that come with any corporate acquisition, it's not hard to envision a reverse trend eventually building: a drive to split up tech companies that have grown too large.
In other words, the tech consolidation of the past few years could turn out to have wasted shareholders' money.
"The demand is not coming from the customers," says Gopal Khanna, who oversees a $600 million technology budget as chief information officer for the state of Minnesota. "On the contrary, I'm best served when there's a phenomenal amount of innovation happening. ... Sometimes creating behemoths slows down that innovation engine."
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100706/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_technology_consolidation
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