This is not a tech strategy, part 234:
"Merging these institutions involved a massive effort to identify each heritage company's "centers of excellence," to reduce complexity and inefficiency and to reconcile different approaches to business".
This is just trying to achieve some poor associate's Excel value for synergies.
A real tech strategy is as much about enabling innovation as it is about efficiency. It's as much about supporting corporate strategy as it is about integration. It's fundamentally about building ways to protect valuable resources, and generate value for consumers.
So, on the one hand, these guys are beginning to eviscerate their own by offshoring critical functions - and beginning to destroy critical core competences. On the other hand, they are totally focused on efficiency in what's left of the core.
If these guys weren't granted the status of perpetual oligopolists by regulation, they would be very ripe targets for massive disruption. Maybe there's a strategy for a revolutionary somewhere in there.