Acquisitions Require Special Skill -- One Competitor to Snake-Bitten HP Has the Knack

International Business Machines (IBM) is the company Hewlett Packard (HPQ) secretly wants to be, one where high-margin service and software businesses support huge but slow-growing (at best) hardware divisions. But IBM got to its generally successful mix of products by tapping into a talent HP is clearly lacking: the ability to acquire and integrate other companies.