Japan's increasingly merger-friendly environment, its accounting reforms and banking consolidation may all help.

ECONOMIST: Japanese corporate profits

The merger had been delayed because of concerns about Genzyme's accounting and its four tracking stocks.

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But everybody knows that pooling-of-interest accounting, which tends to inflate reported earnings after a merger, helped encourage the conglomerate craze of the late Sixties, and that changing those rules made conglomeration much less attractive.

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With the new entity accounting for 25% of English-language book sales, the merger is sure to get a long, hard look from anti-trust regulators.

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In some companies, they may even be temporary or contract staff, sometimes provided by a large public accounting firm, if specialized expertise or extra arms and legs are needed for a merger, a restatement, or a tax problem.

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The biggest lesson of the AOL Time Warner merger may simply be that well-run companies, those that exercise good corporate governance and accounting practices, care and nurture their markets, and are realistic in what they offer to their shareholders, will do better than those that do not.

BBC: Screenshot of AOL.com