Are tech-industry acquisitions always bad for CIOs? Are they always bad for the acquiring company? Are they ever good for the company being acquired?

A recent Associated Press article that quotes several CIOs seems to say that the answers to those questions are yes, no, and no.

And that article makes a lot of nonsense.

Although it quotes some highly reputable CIOs whose comments seem to endorse those views, the problem with the article is that it attempts to assess a profoundly difficult question with a series of lightweight observations. And in so doing, it continues to perpetrate the stereotype of the CIO profession as one whose practitioners have their heads stuck in the sand, who are detached from the realities of the business world, and who yearn for the good old days when nothing changed and unwavering predictability ruled.

Referring to CIOs who have to cope with the repercussions of tech-industry acquisitions, the article says, "Often they get new headaches with multibillion-dollar deals by the likes of Oracle, IBM, SAP, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. When you add the challenges that come with any corporate acquisition, it's not hard to envision a reverse trend eventually building: a drive to split up tech companies that have grown too large."

So according to this piece, the big IT companies, any day now, are going to start to break themselves up because they "have grown too large."

And not only have they grown too large, but they have also made life consistently worse for their CIO customers, according to some comments in the article. In the most pointed of those anecdotal remarks, one CIO says tech-industry acquisitions "never" result in better deals for customers:

"I sit here and I think: What mergers have really benefited everybody, both the companies and the customers? And there aren't a whole lot. There are a lot more that go bad than are successful," says Rosen, a former president of Share, an organization of IBM customers. "I have never seen a merger that saves the customer money." (That's from Robert Rosen, whom the article identifies as CIO for the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.)