Large companies often end up growing to where they have managers/staff who are trained in business management and/or economics, along with a generous mittenful of politics, rather than the business they're trying to manage. As a result, their decisions are based on financial models that work on paper, but disregard the reality of their market. In other words, the business loses its "core competency".
It's why you hear disparaging remarks about companies like AT&T, Microsoft, GE, et al where people (usually insiders) say their business model is "embrace, extend, and extinguish". They look at numbers, and decide some (usually small- to medium-sized) successful company would be a "good fit" technology- and profit-wise, so they buy it up. Then they smother it in bureaucracy with the best of intentions, which eventually kills it.
I used to work at such a monster corporation, and it was always a mixed blessing to hear some rival or complementary company got absorbed. On the one hand, you had access to things you maybe didn't have before, so maybe life got easier and a bunch of people got a bit richer. On the other, you knew the new "division" was going to be effectively smothered to death, and a formerly great product/company that had perhaps gotten too big for its britches was going to fall by the wayside.
Gibson is a textbook example of that very phenomena, and Cakewalk is a casualty of it.
