Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I read some shit talking between Oracle and BEA over at CNET.  But the one line that stood out was how BEA's growth was in question.  While I do think that Oracle + BEA is a natural combination, I also think it's a dangerous as I mentioned before.  But the real issue is not just the combination, but the aspect of growth: when is when for a company to STOP growing?

I see too many acquisitions that often times don't make sense.  For instance, ebay's acquisition of skype, meetup and stumbleupon made zero sense considering that their core business is auctions.  Their other acquisitions such as shopping.com,  rent.com, and even PayPal made some sense because there was somewhat of a clear relationship to ebay's business model (which is essentially online shopping).  However, it's obvious that ebay is only making acquisitions to show some sort of growth.

To an investor though, just buying up companies like these in truth probably doesn't make a lot of sense.  A company can have a portfolio of products, but one must ask what business focus does it have overall?  IAC figured this out when they spun off Expedia into its own stock ticker.  Still to do it for the sake of growing and showing some sort of return to investors seems silly to me.

Okay, maybe making more money to people is common sense, but what I'm saying is that how big is too big?  How is it that Toyota can create a few models of cars every now and then with cosmetic improvements yet not be forced to acquire other companies that do keychains while ebay needs to purchase things that only relate through being online?

Maybe this isn't really a 100% investor related question but one of business saavy that I don't understand.  Or maybe what I'm really looking at is the greed of a company to bloat itself to unbelievable levels.  Or maybe it's that one of these three business models really does well and the others survive mostly through leechdom.

Regardless, I think there comes a point where a business like an ebay or BEA need to stop thinking of massive growth and focus on their improving their core business.  BEA's systems aren't rock solid.  They have flaws and are unwieldly.  I don't see enough add-in products that make development of J2EE that much easier. Why not focus on those areas rather than trying to simply get more buys?  If the product was better quality, more people would want to buy it.  Yet for the headaches and cost, a person is better off with a LAMP application stack.

Or in ebay's case, why not improve their search and real time auctions?  Or create APIs for more 3rd party tools to create something useful that relates to ebay's core business model?

Anyway,  I doubt my idea would get through because all of this is just capitalism.