Hostility Has Its Rewards - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times

Hostility Has Its Rewards - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times: "MENLO PARK, Calif. — “It’s crazy to say you will only grow through innovation,” Larry Ellison, the hard-charging chief executive of Oracle, was telling me last week. “It’s bizarre that there’s a stigma to buying something rather than building it yourself.”

Helge: You can innovate with money.

Here in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurialism is a religion, people have long taken a dim view of acquisitions. A big purchase was, as Mr. Ellison put it, “a confession that there’s a failure to innovate.”

Helge: Buy yourself into innovations!

That is until Mr. Ellison decided about four years ago to go Rambo on this high-tech province of button-downs and khakis with a hostile $10.3 billion bid for PeopleSoft. At first, the bid was considered barbaric. Everyone said Mr. Ellison was bound to fail. After all, as they love to say here, a technology company’s most valuable assets — its engineers — walk out the door every evening. And with a hostile bidder circling, PeopleSoft’s engineers were bound to run. Only they didn’t."

Helge: Changing from one home to another...What happens with the Yahoo and Microsoft marriage?