That's not as bad as it sounds. You would expect acquisition outcomes have a power law distribution. For well run companies, their top acquisition usually adds more value than the total spent on all acquisitions (like Google's acquisition of Doubleclick, ~100B value add) and, for an industry as a whole, the top acquisition should just about cover the entire industry spending on acquisitions (like Apple's acquisition of NeXT, ~600B value add).
Huh. Even if there's a power law distribution, I don't think that explains more than half being negative.
And even if it did, you're only taking the perspective of investors of the acquirer. From many other perspectives, like that of founders, employees, and customers, those numbers are exactly as bad as they look.
As an aside, I think it's egregious to credit NeXT with 600B value add. What they actually bought, aside from making Jobs feel successful, was a decent replacement for their desktop OS. So you can possibly credit the Mac sales from circa 2000 on. But the iPod had nothing to do with NeXT. iOS had a little to do with NeXT, but not a ton. If they had bought BeOS, I don't think the path would have been materially different.
