Platforms grew dominant by acquiring competitors, a direct result of failed antitrust enforcement. Cory Doctorow argues debates over intermediary liability (e.g., Section 230) are a distraction from the core issue: a decades-long drawdown of anti-monopoly law.

The economy is controlled by powerful 'middleman' companies that consumers have never heard of. Food distributor Cisco, for example, has a dominant position supplying nearly all sit-down chain restaurants, shaping food quality and prices across the country from behind the scenes.

Cisco's acquisition of Splunk was transformational, with Splunk leading the combined observability business. This "reverse integration" works because Splunk already operated at a scale relevant to Cisco, making the adoption of their superior SaaS processes worth the change management effort. Small targets' processes are ignored.

Unlike standard corporate M&A, an innovation incubator's acquisition criteria are different. Cisco's Outshift ignores a startup's revenue and business metrics, focusing solely on the technology, talent, and cultural fit to accelerate its own strategic objectives.

Cisco rejects a one-size-fits-all integration timeline. It rapidly integrates corporate functions like HR, finance, and legal for control and compliance. However, it takes a more measured, "surgical" approach with core value drivers like engineering and sales to protect the acquired company's unique strengths.

Acquiring smaller companies at a 5-6x EBITDA multiple and integrating them to reach a larger scale allows you to sell the combined entity at a 10-12x multiple. This multiple expansion is a powerful, often overlooked financial driver of M&A strategies, creating value almost overnight.

Cisco moved from a dysfunctional "throw it over the wall" M&A model to an integrated one. The key change was implementing quarterly reviews where the integration team reports back to the original deal team on progress and synergy attainment. This forces dealmakers to learn from the downstream consequences of their strategies.

In its failed merger attempt, Cisco argued its market competitors included Sam's Club, a claim regulators rejected. This illustrates that the core of an antitrust case is often not the raw market share number, but the highly debatable and often opaque definition of the market itself, which can be skewed by paid economists.

Cisco's M&A capability is powered by a ~180-person "M&A Community" of dedicated and fractional experts embedded in functions like IT and finance. This distributed team serves as a bridge between central integration and functional execution, meeting regularly and using a shared platform to create a scalable, repeatable M&A machine.