Top 10 technology company mergers

2. Apple/NeXT
Iain Thomson: To say this was a merger is understating it. It was more of a love in. Apple management had spurned Steve Jobs and forced him out of 'his' company, so he sold all his shares and walked away to start NeXT. It was a classic 'toys out of the pram' moment and made Jobs look like a petulant fool.

NeXT went on to burn mountains of cash building computers that very few people were willing to pay for. Its designs were innovative, its hardware sexy and its software a revolution, but all this came at a price that had corporate accounting departments shuddering.

Meanwhile, back at Apple, John Scully's reign was going from bad to worse and the company was in so much trouble it had to get a bail-out from its arch-enemy Microsoft in order to stay afloat. Apple needed a shot in the arm, and luckily Jobs had got over his tantrum and was ready to come back into the fold.

When Apple bought NeXT in 1996 it might as well have put up a big banner saying 'Welcome home Steve'. The deal was all about getting Jobs back to pick up the pieces, but Apple got more than that for its money.

Chiefly it got a really good operating system, something Apple had been lacking for some time. The work on NeXT led to OS X and the success of that operating system can be traced directly back to its roots in Jobs's bastard step-child company.

Shaun Nichols: As a Mac geek, I have a soft place in my heart for this deal. It is likely to have saved Apple, and played a huge role in shaping the web as we know it.

What a lot of people don't know is how close it came to never happening. In the mid-1990s, Apple was in crisis mode. Mismanagement and short-sightedness on the part of executives left the company with a collection of failing products powered by a Mac OS operating system that was utterly incapable of meeting the performance and stability demands of the time.

Knowing that they needed to rebuild from the kernel up, Apple's brass went on the hunt for a new Macintosh operating system.

The first target was BeOS. The promising new operating system is still considered by many to be among the finest ever, and was initially targeted by Apple. But chief executive Jean-Louis Gassée set the buyout price too high and Apple looked to other options. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was able to sell the company on his new venture, NeXT, and the rest is history.

1. HP/Compaq
Shaun Nichols: At a time when the industry was teetering on the verge of a radical shift, HP made what would become a monumental business deal.

The company brokered an agreement to pay $25bn for what was the largest acquisition the industry had ever seen.

The deal also created a major new contender across multiple areas of the IT industry. In the enterprise space, Sun and IBM faced a formidable new contender in HP. Meanwhile, the once mighty Dell now found itself with a major threat for the PC sales crown in both the consumer and enterprise markets.

The transition was far from smooth, however. Financial performance sputtered amid the economic decline, and a ton of talent was lost to layoffs and resignations as the combined companies struggled to remake their corporate culture.

In the end, the deal did achieve its ultimate goal. HP is one of the biggest names in the industry and has become a major player in just about every area of the technology sector.

Iain Thomson: While Shaun may be right that HP achieved its goals with the merger, this was down more to luck than judgement, and the company lost a lot of goodwill along the way.

Right from the start the merger looked like it was going to cause serious problems. Carly Fiorina, then chief executive at HP, had come in on a wave of support from staff. She's an excellent speaker and, watching her address staff at a conference, she got them all motivated behind the deal. But there was a cost.

The merger was opposed by member of the founder's family, who rightly feared that it would change the corporate environment for the worse. The battle was long and hard and accusations of phone tapping were bandied about, accusations that now look a lot more believable in light of later events.

After the merger went ahead HP lost its corporate culture, one of the best in the industry when it came to looking after staff, and gained a hardware arm it seemed not to know how to deal with. The company became more about sales than engineering and lost its innovative edge.

The focus on sales, and mistakes by Dell, has left HP with the number one position in hardware, but to call the merger a success is possibly over-egging the pudding. HP is doing well now, but we have yet to see whether that will last after losing so much of what made it special.