Thursday, November 17, 2011

The appetite to acquire - Mantra of IT world

I wonder what do the multi-million dollar companies do with their revenue apart from investing in launching better,expensive and exquisite technologies, giving their CEO's not just a silver spoon but maybe worth gold and diamond mines and obviously paying their employees magnificently well.

But then , IT world is all about creating new, giving the world something better, something easy , something suave. And for that, these brands are shelling out amount worth a fortune to expand their business, diversify or just to get something unique. Here is where the concept of acquiring and expanding comes in.

And trust me, this is not new but going on since years. Back in 1997, microsoft bought web based email service , hotmail , for a whooping $500m, big enough for that time. Since then there has been lots of additions in their acquired list, with the latest popular being skype-the worlds best voice-video chat service over the internet for $8.5b. Microsoft even has stakes in AT&T and surprisingly even worth $150m in Apple bought back in 1997 to share some softwares so that the companies don't end up suing each other.

The company that does not need an advertisement, Google, has been really lucky in its biggest acquisitiosn like Picasa, Android, Youtube and latest being Motorola. Android inc. was just a 24 month old startup when Google bought it. Android and Youtube can be called as the two most popular acquisitions. Also, apart from 17000 patents that google got from Motorola, it bought additional 1023 patents from IBM. This is the importance of intellectual property.

Another popular story has been of Oracle purchasing Sun Microsystems for $7.4b. The first thought that came into my mind on hearing this news was that what would be Sun's certifications be called now. Will SCJP become OCJB?

Not just acquiring companies , these business bosses even have a fetish for unique domain names. Unarguably, The most popular phone in the world - iphone has a dedicated website called iphone.com that is rumoured to be bought by Apple for $1m. The social networking giant facebook shelled out 200 thousand dollars to buy facebook.com while changing the name from TheFacebook to Facebook. And now they even have fb.com that came with a price tag of $8.5m. And with the advent of cloud computing, Apple once again adding to its i-series legacy bought the domain icloud.com for $4.5m.

Now i know, where these big companies spend their money !!! And i am a really big fan of Apple, Microsoft and facebook. Credits to "Pirates of the silicon valley" and "The social network". :)
happy reading!






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