Cisco buys Pure Digital (Flip Camera)

[Ghoulish Delight]

There's been some buzz about this for a while, it's official today. Over 1/2 a billion dollars.

Cisco is an acquisition-hungry company. According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Systems_acquisitions), if this deal gets completed, it'll be #168. That's an average of 10/year since 1993. This is only #2 this year. With stock prices appearing to be bottoming out around the market, Cisco must be salivating.

I say all of this because there are pretty regular rumors that my company is in Cisco's sights. Even before those rumors were going around, it was something I had thought pretty likely. Cisco's made some obvious moves to move into our marketspace, and their competitors have recently purchased our competitors. And right now our stock is cheap.

They put up a lot of money for Pure Digital, and our, I believe, is worth quite a bit more than that (our yearly revenue nearly matches what they paid), so they may not want to pull the trigger yet. But then, looking at that Wiki list, that doesn't seem to have really stopped them in the past.

Being bought out is always risky. You never know who's suddenly going to become redundant, or which departments they'll want to relocate. But I've also never been on that side of a buy out, so it'd be an interesting new experience. Plus, I have a couple friends who work at Pure Digital, so I'd suddenly be their coworkers.

[Andrew]

Being bought out is always risky. You never know who's suddenly going to become redundant, or which departments they'll want to relocate. But I've also never been on that side of a buy out, so it'd be an interesting new experience.

Seven times, all on the acquired side. It sucked almost every time. There's massive confusion and real work basically stops while priorities are re-evaluated. The best acquisition of which I've been part was the most recent, when my tiny startup was acquired by Nokia in late '07. Apparently it was also Nokia's smoothest-ever acquisition and now our group is a model for future M&A. Still, even with that, there were weeks where nobody knew what they were supposed to be doing or why or for whom.

All I'm saying is if it looks like your company is going to be acquired, keep your options open.

[Ghoulish Delight]

For sure. Although with 168 under their belt one would suppose Cisco's got it down to a science. I'll be keeping in touch with my friends to see how their process goes.

On the plus side, we're pretty distinct from anything Cisco currently does, so there wouldn't be too much redundancy on the engineering side to worry about.

[Moonliner]

I think your biggest concern would be getting relocated to San Jose or other inconvenient location.