In the past, companies grew by innovation and effort. Now, they grow by
cannibalizing other companies: the bigger fish eats the smaller fish.

You may remember 10 years ago, it was possible to purchase hard disks from a
wide array of vendors. Then Western Digital's SCSI unit went out of
business, Maxtor acquired Conner and finally Quantum sold its Hard Disk unit
to Maxtor. However, it seems the several acquisitions troubled Maxtor for
years and now it's acquired by Seagate:
http://www.seagatemaxtor.com/
True, Western Digital still exists for the IDE/ATA market and in the SCSI
side, you have Fujitsu, Hitachi and IBM, but do they have a wide impact in
sales?

Will the day come when we purchase HW from a single vendor and SW from a
single vendor? I find strange that neither IBM nor Seagate tried to buy
Western Digital, but I find more strange that Symantec didn't start
purchasing competing firewall vendors.

C.
---
Claudio Valderrama C.
SW developer, consultant.
http://www.cvalde.net - http://www.firebirdsql.org