Synergy to the Nth, where N is negative

A miracle of corporate cross pollination. What have we here? Lego Group cum Lucas Arts cum Nintendo? We might have celebrated this as synergy if the product didn’t look like hillbilly inbreeding. Computer animation can do no better than smiley faces? If there will be a look that defines this decade, it will be featureless Playmobil and thumb people.
 
The data processing adage says: garbage in, garbage out. Multiplicative “synergy” has been the sales pitch for corporate mergers and collusions, but the less heralded consequence of sum greater than its parts still holds: crap times crap equals big crap.