[gizmo]

> Yet a common management / product strategy is to buy random companies as though they are ingredients of a dish and think it'll just work.

Acquisitions are an easy way to juice top line growth. Acquisitions also offer ample opportunity to put lipstick on your finances. After all, any acquisition has many one-time costs and you can use this to juice your margins. You also forecast substantial cost savings by eliminating redundant positions. All in all, your gross margins and YoY growth look a lot healthier after the acquisition even when nothing has fundamentally improved about your business.

Repeated acquisitions really muddy the water and make it even harder for analysts to figure out how well your core business is doing. Especially when growth in your core business is stalling it makes a lot of sense to obfuscate your finances while you purchase top line growth.

All the while the stock price stays high and the executives get to enjoy their option packages. Eventually the music stops, but clever executives jump ship before that happens.

[sh34r]

By the time the music stops, they’ll have grown too big to fail, and it’ll also likely be a sector-wide downturn, so they’ll just get another bailout from Uncle Sam. Moral hazard is endemic in Sillycon Valley.

[AYBABTME]

DO is just at 3.4B$ market cap; far from becoming too big to fail.