There was an interesting article in "Wallstreet 24/7" online news this morning. It listed the major corporations and retail brands that had gone out of business in the past year or were likely close down this year. All had something in common. They were part of conglomerations in which one company had borrowed huge sums of money in order to gobble up competition . . . or just become larger and more impressive.
The justification for merger mania in the 1990s was that bigger was better and more efficient. Evidently not. Bigger just meant bigger salaries for executives and more impressive corporate headquarters. Merger mania also appears to have created a lot of corporate dinosaurs in the early 21st century. Profitable companies when absorbed into conglomerates as subsidiaries just couldn't generate enough cash to pay back loans when the economy faltered.
Although no one currently thinks that AOL Time Warner will go out of business, it surprisingly is looking for a buyer to purchase AOL internet services. This is really ironic since AOL gobbled up Time Warner a few years ago, who a couple years before, gobbled up CNN and Turner Enterprises. CNN dropped from No 1 as a direct result of that brilliant move. Turner Productions (movies & TV programs) ceased to exist, because making movies "was not one of AOL's long term corporate goals."
The destruction of Turner Productions was a real tragedy. Although some people might not like Ted Turner, the fact is that he had dedicated his studio to turn out a broad range of high quality movies that accurately explored American history. His logic was that fewer and fewer people were reading history books, and that Americans could only appreciate our many blessings, if we truly understood our history. Most of his movies did very well. The decision by AOL executives was based on ego, not profits.
Well . . . now AOL is no longer a cash cow, so that division will soon be expunged from the dinosaur it created.
Life is like a box of chocolates. 
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| In Business . . . Bigger is not always better! |
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KnittinKitten
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Apr 22 @ 10:27AM
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It appears to be happening faster than I can keep track of.....
KK 
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sweettie
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Apr 22 @ 3:57PM
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 mmmmmmmm chocolates 
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TexasRacer
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Apr 22 @ 4:13PM
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Interesting opinion. I worked for an outstanding company many years ago, very successful and an excellent working environment. Truly a great company. We were acquired by Sprint and things went down hill from there. Sprint crushed the culture of the organization and eventually ran off all the best people. There were a couple of sales reps bringing in more than 2M monthly in professional services revenues, all were W2ing mid six figures. Sprint capped their earnings at 180 and all of them left within a month, taking the cream of the crop customers with 'em. Even more disconcerting was that the CEO took a $40M bonus in 2003, a year Sprint lost money.
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Slohand_47
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Apr 22 @ 11:11PM
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Truer words were never spoken.
In the good old days, you started out at the bottom and learned how a company worked before you worked your way up to management. Now you get a college degree and VIOLA! Instant executive. You make decisions based on what you learned from a professor who was too stupid to make it in the real world and teaches theory instead.
But hey... you run the company in the ground........ NO problem. You get a multi-million dollar severance package and retire to your home next to the golf course while they look for the next college graduate golden boy who has no freaking clue what the company makes, but...... he's a manager!
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Peabianjay
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Apr 23 @ 12:39AM
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Texas: We were acquired by Sprint and things went down hill from there. Bah! You stole my comment, Texas.  Although, in my case, I was a 'victimized' customer of "London Telecom", that was bought out by Sprint. Service tanked so I cancelled. (After a lengthy contract dispute.)
It puzzles me that any customers continue to return to the poor-service, poor-quality mega-companies. (There was a blog recently about McDonald's.)
Seems that the big companies get so obsessed with profit margins, they forget the basics that made them successful in the first place: Customer service, quality goods, competitive pricing, etc.
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Etowah
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Apr 23 @ 7:28AM
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I dropped Sprint long distance for the same reason. Suddenly, it became impossible even to make a long distant call. There was always a busy signal, indicating that the main interstate cables were overloaded. I couldn't even reach their customer service for the same reason. They didn't respond to written messages that I was having poor service.
Finally, I had to get my local telephone company to notify them that I was dropping their long distance service. They had access to another direct line to customer service.
I later learned that the bad service was a direct result of Sprint executives deciding that the "money" was in cellular and intentionally reducing the capacity of their long distance system. Well, corporate income is corporate income. Now Sprint is on the list of those companies likely to go under . . . following the path of once mega-telephone giant MCM. I can remember in the early 1990s when MCM and AT&T constantly fought it each other for getting long distance customers.
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