EMC bought VMware for $650 million and Dell bought EMC for $74 billion and now sold VMware for $61 billion so it worked out for someone.

The more important question is whether these type of acquisitions end up well for the customer or the employees. And in that case, I think the answer is rarely yes.

The point of massive acquisitions are to enrich company stockholders (generally the CxO's and key management), lock up key engineering talent from the market, and give the manager who lead the acquisition a fat bonus. Generally, everyone else loses. To offset the cost, typically value is extracted from the bought company until the product's value dies. Short term-wise, the people involved will get a lot of money and be gone by the time the consequences cannot be ignored.

That said, acquisitions can work if there is due diligence. I'm in a company that has acquired several companies in a related field. Each of the companies have had complementary products, and the cultures were vetted to be similar ours before purchase, ie small groups (30-50 people) who have demonstrated high skill, high trust, and low ego. Finally, there has been an effort keep groups generally autonomous while finding ways to synergize employees and services. There has been a strong feeling of working together. Groups have been willing to share their expertise and experience with other.

I guess in other words: the acquisition is a good idea, even if a product is subsumed into another product, there is plenty of real work to go around for employees to do. If you have to promptly fire people "because redundancy," it wasn't being done to improve your position in the field.

> Do these type of transactions ever end up well for either the acquirer or the acquired company?

It depends on what you mean by "end up well" and who, exactly, is meant by "acquirer" and "acquired". Yes, they're lucrative and worthwhile from the point of finance people, a rarified sliver of stake-holders and the law firms who buzz around to service all these. If they weren't you would not be seeing them as much.

From the point of view of technology advancement, the professionals who want to actually WORK in these domains, and the customers who depend on the products? No. These mergers/acquisitions are at best a mixed bag and more often a downgrade, or worst of all, a career-derailing adjustment.

I think Trello and Atlassian went well (massively different scale, though). I think the rep is that Atlassian mainly does well by leaving the companies alone as independent organizations, more like investment positions rather than actually merging the tech.

20 years ago when I was part of a company that was acquired the executives told us that only 1 in 4 were successful, but they were determined to make us one of the successful ones. (it wasn't)

I have no idea if the 1 in 4 number is correct, but it feels reasonable.

Yes. See Oracle.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/market...

More than half of acquisitions and mergers fail, depending on the industry.