John Gruber^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Dan Lyons^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Steve Ballmer had another colourful analogy, he used it in response to companies claiming that a merger would create a powerhouse to challenge the market leader: "It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster." (Thanks to "raldi" f…
However, if the merging companies compete in the same market, it would be fairer to claim that "It's like taking the number two and number three sprinters in the world, and having them run IN SERIES against the number one sprinter." (emphasis mine). Because number two and three companies merging to a new number one does in fact happen. (Note that this is the case here, though. No idea where Google is going with this.…
Taking one example I know of second-hand:
My brother worked for the #2 company in his industry at the time they acquired #3 in an effort to overtake the market leader. It worked out disastrously. It turns out that #3, despite being the less profitable (and therefore less valuable) company, was also physically larger. Internally it had a lot of inefficient ways of doing things that resulted in them needing a lot more people to accomplish the same volume of work.
You might think that #2 was then able to lean up #3 and make them more profitable, as part of the acquisition process. But it just isn't that simple - this was a large multinational with ossified internal procedures that were baked into the very infrastructure (both physical and IT) of the company. Things were never going to change overnight.
So, instead, what happened was that, over the next 1-2 years, #3's culture got imposed on the employees from #2, by simple virtue of the #3 camp being twice as many people. So, in the years since then, the #1 company's market lead has consolidated into outright market dominance, as a result of their #2 competitor suddenly becoming no more competitive than their #3 competitor.