The technology industry repeats too many of its mistakes too often, and many of them occur during flurries of Wall Street-driven mergers, argues InfoWorld's Bill Snyder. We're on the eve of a new surge in M&A activity, he warns, so be prepared to see companies making their near-term stock price a priority.

When mergers are motivated by big payoffs for investment banks and shareholders, they can end up costing companies a great deal in lost intellectual property and the knowledge of employees who are edged out, Snyder writes. The roster of failed mergers includes former tech heavyweights such as AOL/Time Warner, Alcatel/Lucent, Novell/WordPerfect, and National Semiconductor/Fairchild Semiconductor. 

One of the more common tech company errors is insisting that one's own product is supreme, while rejecting innovations developed by other companies, Snyder writes. Using R&D to pursue only proprietary technologies rather than innovations that can be leveraged by others is a tendency that is costly in the long run. Snyder says this mistake is well illustrated by company leadership at Digital Equipment Corp. and Sun Microsystems.   

"Like [DEC founder Ken] Olsen, Sun co-founder Scott McNealy was loath to see that the product he built the company on was well past its prime. Sun's proprietary servers and their proprietary chips built the Internet, while industry-standard products became the norm--but at Sun, they 'weren't invented here,'" he writes. "What's more, McNealy, like Olsen, was a victim of 'founderitis' and simply couldn't let go. By the time he stepped down from his post as CEO, it was simply too late for Sun to stand on its own."

For more:
- see Bill Snyder's post at InfoWorld

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