The art of no deal.

The article discusses corporate mergers and lawsuits. Lawyers have been fighting over one merger deal that probably should not be made"Oracle Corp.'s bid for PeopleSoft"it came to light that Microsoft Corp. and SAP had been in discussions early in 2004 to join forces, making the world's No. 1 and No. 3 software companies. The talks fell apart due to expected difficulty in integrating the companies and potential antitrust hassles"the same issues that are now dogging Oracle's bid for PeopleSoft Inc. Microsoft and SAP have been close partners for years, but that does not necessarily mean they would have worked well as one company. Microsoft has a way of totally assimilating the companies it acquires, with all traces of the original company mysteriously disappearing. But SAP would have been hard to swallow, even for Bill Gates & Co. SAP's software, like most large-scale ERP deployments, is hard enough for enterprise IT departments to digest. The combination would have been bad for the companies and bad for customers.