But as the two economies become ever more complementary, the momentum for change might well become difficult to resist.
Neil Saunders, managing director of UK retail consultancy Conlumino, said that while the brands were complementary, the deal would also help both companies to arrest their slowing sales.
"It's quite striking how complementary the brains of women and men really are," Ruben Gur, a co-author on the study, said in a statement.
"The New Zealand businesses of NZME and Fairfax are, to a large extent, complementary," the companies said in a joint statement.
Perhaps as important as the volume of the trade and investment, though, is how complementary the two countries' industries are.
Because the two strands of a DNA double helix are complementary, the sequence of new units that attach to each growing strand reveals the identity of the units on the tethered strand.
"It's quite striking how complementary the brains of women and men really are," said Rubin Gur of Pennsylvania University, a co-author of the study.
The two companies had been complementary: the Lyric focused on the standards, and Opera Boston's specialty was new and more esoteric works.
"The two initiatives are complementary," the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said of the two approaches taken by Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Obama.
The two genres are nicely complementary: the one deals with courtship and marriage, while the other examines the career of a young man growing up to be a worthy king.
But if it has trouble competing against Latin ISPs, it will find it still tougher to go head-to-head against AOL and Yahoo!While the fit between Terra and Lycos is superficially complementary, the combination may not bring any worthwhile new strengths to the core markets of either firm, apart perhaps from Spanish-speakers in North America.
