In addition to Kaizyn's excellent point, making acquisition your corporate strategy is basically admitting you have a product that can't survive on its own. That's a problem - why can't it work without acquisition?
When ownership of a popular company changes, it doesn't immediately make consumers dump the product. They rather wait and they can give up basically when the new owner is doing terribly wrong. In general, consumers don't care that much about ownership.
What if Steve Jobs sells his shares and leaves the company? You can't even tell for sure if Apple would become better or worse after that.
You're not Steve Jobs and your company isn't Apple, it's a piece of paper. When the first thing you say is "I'm looking to sell this company", myself as a customer thinks: "The guy running it is only in for a quick payday, I think I'll try someone else."
Acquisition is not a bad thing, planning on acquisition prior to you even building something worth acquiring is something that probably won't work out too well. If you instead build something lasting, finding people to give you money so you can retire won't be that big of a deal, really.
That doesn't make sense. Even if my whole strategy WAS to get acquired, I wouldn't plaster it in 48-pt font on the website. What do you think Twitter's strategy is? It's a pretty cool idea, but I fail to see how anyone could monetize it. Does that mean no one uses Twitter?
I think that's just a cliche and reality proves the opposite. A lot of acquisitions are going on constantly in all industries, and there is no or very little correlation between that and sales.
Do you have anything to prove that? I don't have anything to prove my assertion (other than personal opinion) so I'd be interested if you had something.
Can't remember when was the last time that change of ownership influenced my decisions on buying or using products, at least immediately after acquisition. Of course new owners can dump the product, but likewise they can improve it. I didn't think about it before starting this discussion, but it seems to be true.
