Shhhh... My Common Sense Is Tingling - RTOTD #836

Day 836

So I know this is going to bore a lot of you and it also bores me, but I just gotta ask why the fuck I always see the same situation playing out when it comes to corporate mergers of acquisitions. I'll lay out the situation because it always seems to be the same set of events and it has never and will never make any fucking sense to me. So maybe one of you have the answer.

Company A has been slowly in decline for a number of years. They have existed on brand name from a time gone by and haven't really had all that great of products in recent  years.

Company B show up and partners with and eventually buys Company A.

Company A's management team ends up in charge of a majority of, or the highest positions in Company B.

Now, I understand that sometimes it's one of those things where Company A's management won't let the sale happen unless they're "taken care of" afterwards or something like that, but why Company B would even consider something like this is just... uncanny... to me.

I bring this up because I've seen it hundreds of times. Most recently with Microsoft buying up Nokia's phone division. Nokia hasn't had a decent product that wasn't a Windows Phone product in approaching a decade. Not since the beginning of the smart phone revolution. They've been dying for 7 or 8 years now and are now being bought up by Microsoft. None of this is shocking. None of it even makes you take notice really. Microsoft wanted a phone manufacturer to get into the in-house hardware business and compete with the Google/Motorola mashup and Apple. They need that streamlined software/hardware match up to make a good device run as it it's 100% in sync with their operating system, because it is and because the operating system and device were built to run together the way Apple does it and the way Google/Motorola are trying to do it.

I get all that stuff.

But the thing that is bewildering to me is how the management transitions always work. Ballmer has been running Microsoft for a while and he's retiring next year. That's cool. He's getting older and he's made his bank. He's helped to steer the company back in the right general direction for a while now and that's great. He's earned it (as much as any CEO really earns anything) and he's gonna go off an enjoy his billions of dollars on the beach somewhere, drinking fruty drinks with umbrellas in them & getting a tan while staring at 20-something girls in very small bikinis. I'd be doing the exact same thing if I was him.

But where it gets preplexing to me is that his likely successor as CEO of Microsoft? The guy that was running Nokia.

How is this not a face-palming moment for business people? The guy that was running the successful company is stepping aside, and the guy that was running the other company into an inevitable grave because he obviously didn't have any ideas on how to make the company relevant again gets put in his place? How much fucking sense does that make?

Sure, he ran a company that was also a big, mutli-billiion dollar, international company like Microsoft but he also obviously didn't do a terribly good job or they wouldn't have been for sale and stagnating/failing.

Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. I didn't go to business school. I'm a history/poli-sci major that ended up as a physicist and a mediocre writer. But my Common Sense is tingling here and this situation never makes any god damned sense to me. Because I've seen it a dozen times and I know I'll see it another dozen. The strong company buys the weak company and then gives the weak company's management authority positions in the strong company.

But I'm either chalking this up to I'm a super hero because I have Common Sense or maybe I'm just totally fucking missing something.