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0. Founders, non-executive employees, and even sometimes end-users can benefit, just as much or more than executives or shareholders. 1. Not really true in general, because the buyee often was not in direct competition with the buyer. In specifics, sure sometimes the buyee is bought and killed, and sure sometimes "build it (and compete)" was actually in consideration at buyer -- though as an aside if they did build it instead of buy it we'd still get complaints from other people on finding a way to discourage product expansion and vertical integration. One could also say here that by eliminating middlemen (if the buyer intends to integrate that is) efficiency is increased, but this is not necessarily general either. 2. Marginally less employer competition, and perhaps not even that, because under 0 we've got a group of beneficiaries who may now be able to form or fund new companies, in direct competition or not. Avoid static pie thinking. Related here is an opposing concern that preventing mergers can result in a lower cap on wages, though this is not general either. I do concede that if we expand the pool of employees beyond software engineers, some sort of layoff protection may be desirable, because technically and instantaneously yes the now-irrelevant laid off accountants for example at the buyee have a tighter market to compete in as buyer doesn't want them and their old job has vanished. (Though many layoff packages already implicitly do something like this, the net effect is to give the individual more time to find a role at a different firm or else retool because the market has reallocated the demand for their role.) 3. Being too big to fail isn't really related with the scope of a company's product catalog. Fragility is a big topic. Rather than spouting my own ideological biases and principles I'd rather ask some numbers questions. Specifically what thresholds would you consider reasonable before introducing your discouragements/blockers. #2 seems most tractable to start with -- say the US has 5 million software engineers, Facebook has 50,000 of them, and wants to acquire another company with 15,000 software engineers. Is the shift above 1% of employees in the field to 1.3% objectionable? Or do we not worry until a single firm employs say 30% of the field? Is the relative increase of 0.3% too big a merger regardless of the starting point? Or is there even such a too-big relative size and we should just look at the final total? Should we count the total employees at each company, or rather subdivide even further taking into account sales, accountants, and perhaps even types of software engineers? |