As with AOL, these companies bring internet-based skills to a marriage. Optimal corporate size is generally conceded to be quite different for place and space-based organizations. Marketspace companies generally rely upon a few radical, if not eccentric, thinkers to break from the current paradigm and produce new and sometimes heretical ideas. These ideas are usually brought to the marketspace by small teams of committed ideologues. Size is similarly a problem for organizations attempting to enter new lines of business.
Size brings with it the culture of bureaucracy.
Cultural differences have sunk many a merger and will sink many more in the future. Very few organizations relish the thought that they need to cannibalize their existing product lines to help prepare the products that future customers desire. Trying to do anything new continually runs afoul of established procedures and the plethora of checks and balances that have been put in place for the traditional business line. The culture of the old is as incompatible with the new as is the physics of Einstein with that of Aristotle. The principal lesson that higher education institutions can draw from the flurry of consolidation taking place in the information industry is the necessity to have a vision of the future and the role that they intend to play in that future.