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10 Microsoft Acquisitions and What They Mean Now
FrankPoole writes "CRN takes a look at the past five years of Microsoft's acquisition history, which totals $13 billion and more than 7,000 new employees, and highlights 10 deals and how they've affected the software giant. While some larger acquisitions stand out for better or worse, such as Danger and aQuantive, there are some smaller, blink-and-you'll-miss-it deals that have proved pivotal for Microsoft's push into new areas such as virtualization. And Microsoft's recent acquisition track record may lend credence to the heavy criticism levied against the company by former employees like Dick Brass."
Most of the companies on that list were intelligent purchasing decisions by Microsoft, even if all of them didn't pan out in the end. Most of them even have examples included of where their input has specifically improved Microsoft's products. I think that Dick Brass's article in the Times was fairly harsh, but if what he says is true and Microsoft no longer has the capability for innovation, then buying innovators with their still-impressive supply of cash and then successfully integrating their work into their products is a good substitute for coming up with those ideas themselves. It's certainly not ideal, but it can work as long as they still have the funds to do so.
If a company cannot innovate internally, then they have to acquire from outside.
Grow or die... but, it has allowed MS to improve their product offerings over time. Should be interesting to see what the future holds.
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> Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator.
Microsoft has always been a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator (though I suppose dumpster-diving does require a certain amount of agility).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"CRN takes a look at the past five years of Microsoft's acquisition history, which totals $13 billion and more than 7,000 new employees, and highlights 10 deals and how they've affected the software giant. While some larger acquisitions stand out for better or worse, such as Danger and aQuantive, there are some smaller, blink-and-you'll-miss-it deals that have proved pivotal for Microsoft's push into new areas such as virtualization."
Sounds like it might be an interesting article. Also looks odd - a slashdot article submission about Microsoft that's, at worse, neutral. Where's the pro-forma jab?
"And Microsoft's recent acquisition track record may lend credence to the heavy criticism levied against the company by former employees like Dick Brass."
Ah... there it is.
Bungie, Visio, Great Plains Software?
These three companies have made more money and been more influential than these companies!
Well, It's a slight improvement over anything kdawson puts up.
I've been able to get pro-Microsoft articles posted by kdawson by slandering Microsoft in my summaries just because I know he's less likely to read the article itself if I slam Microsoft in my write-up.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
"Hi, MicroSoft here and with all this bad press coming out lately, I would like to ensure you that we have some truly revolutionary products coming out soon... blah blah blah."
Wake me up when they actually produce something cool that I can touch and feel. I'm getting tired of the standard "MicroSoft is going to innovate, just wait and see" PR tagline.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Ah, Danger, the company that all the competent people abandoned, and ended messing up the storage/backup for all of T-Mobile Sidekick users' data?
How did that go anyway, I heard they managed to find a way to recover most of it?
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Though not acquired in the past 5 years, Visio is still the best "Microsoft" product. It is the only one I wish I had, as the open source alternatives don't have the bells and whistles that make Visio a great product.
If you have had to use it - you know exactly what I'm talking about. Its got all the interoperability of Microsoft products that you'd expect, with all the ease of use and understanding that each Office iteration lacks.
And I'm not seeing a print button
So how many of you have been in mid sized growing companies that eventually kill off any sort of innovation they had due to Turf Wars? Every mid
sized company I have ever worked for tend to start the death spiral just about before they hit the 300-400 million mark. Sure the brand carries
them for a while but all innovation starts dying due to politics and turf wars. Most will start heavy acquisitions at this point to stay ahead but that
only turns the acquired into mush. It is a interesting phenomena to watch from the sidelines as the business inevitably implodes.
Got Code?
Is it me, or has the press turned really critical of Microsoft in past couple of months? It sort of feels like the barbarians are at the gate, waiting to taste Balmer's bitter flesh. Yesterday it came to a crescendo with Joe Wilcox publishing a devastating piece on how middle manager culture is destroying innovation at the company.
I can't really peg this on one single thing, but if I were to guess, it's probably because Apple and Google are mapping out the future while Microsoft is still hung up chasing ghosts of yesteryear with me-too products with little or no tangible value.
Or perhaps it's just confirmation bias on my part because I don't particularly care for the company or majority of their products.
After all, Bill Gates didn't get that rich by writing a bunch of checks!
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
because you usually hear it from the executives and others who are well taken care of...
But having living through an acquisition by Microsoft of the small company I was working at, I personally found Microsoft's internal culture to be toxic to much of what made our startup successful in the first place. As I saw it, for the typical 'guy in the trenches' your competition soon stops being the other companies competing in your market and becomes your co-workers. The success of your origination is disconnected from the success of its products in the marketplace, while your personal success soon depends almost entirely upon your skills at competing against your peers, as it is predetermined how many winners and losers there will be amongst you.
The reason why Microsoft is more of an acquire company than an innovation company is that the waters it swims in are different these days.
When MS started out, they had little money and the market was nearly empty. Very little competition. So the best move for MS to make was innovation. Come up with something new and market that. And hope to make it big, which they did. It was a gamble.
Now, MS is HUGE. And the market is full - loads of competition. They don't have to innovate anymore. They can assimilate small fish that do their innovation for them. They don't have to take the risks a small company would have to take anymore. A startup in this environment would have to gamble hugely to get big. There isn't much room. Patents and other competition means there are very small survival spaces in the ecosystem. That is what MS is hoping to acquire. The "oh wow I didn't think of that" part of the market. They don't have to think like a small "hope we can make it" company anymore. They're here to stay. Now given that, what is the best strategy? Stop anyone else from competing at their scale. Buy them out and make the marketplace ecosystem even smaller.
The environment has changed, so MS changed to adapt to the new environment. It's not surprising.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It's true that Gates may not have been a real leader of Microsoft since the 1980s, but like Jobs he was the charismatic symbol of his company. The media ate up his "The Road Ahead" stuff just like they fawn over Jobs' keynotes. Ballmer, despite his sometimes amusing antics, is basically a generic CEO of no real consequence or media appeal.
Go with a given name of "Balzo" and you don't need to reverse the order.
Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.
This sounds like the same thing they do to external competition.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The claim that Apple II technique was proper subpixel antialiasing by design is debunked on Wikipedia.
Translation:
"Wah, stop bashing my favorite big corporation! The other big corporations are no better, blah blah, whinge, whinge".
CLUE: intelligent people don't have "favorite" big corporations.
Where did he profess his love for any corporation? Pointing out that Google gets much of its innovation from others doesn't mean he loves Microsoft or any other large corporation. I guess an intelligent person such as yourself already knew that.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
The borg reference itself is out of date, and so is appropriate for Gates, and Gates will always be appropriate for Microsoft. I think putting a halo on Jobs and using that for Apple stories would probably have the negative effect you're looking for.
Actually, in the early 80s, the name Microsoft wouldn't elicit much except "Yeah, I think I may have used their version of DOS once" and not much else.They were just one company in a sea of many putting out versions of DOS. The derision didn't start until later versions of Windows were released. Most people at the time liked the first versions Windows becasue it gave them a GUI instead of doing everything from the command prompt. You would be hard pressed to find someone complaining about good old Windows for Workgroups 3.1 back in the day.
"But this one goes to 11!"
"Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator."
The small company I work for is now mired in its own processes. I have no authority to do anything to change that. The positive is that we will not get to the stage of being an attractive acquisition, so jobs are pretty safe.
The downside is all the key innovators ( I include myself) at my work feel stymied.
I would not feel sorry for the strategists at Microsoft, but I would feel sorry for their innovators. Their day cannot be a cakewalk.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Definitely untrue. In the early '80s, Microsoft was the company with one of the best versions of BASIC. If you'd used any of their products, you'd have used MS BASIC. It came in ROM on a lot of 8-bit machines. They didn't ship a DOS until IBM asked them to (at which point they bought a cheap CP/M clone and rebranded it). All IBM PCs shipped with MS DOS (branded as PC DOS) and so did almost all clones, because they wanted to be compatible.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
D'oh, I forgot all about Basic! Yep, possibly one of the best versions of basic that was out there. I actually used Dr DOS a lot back in the day, until MS DOS was at about version 5.0 or so.
"But this one goes to 11!"
BASIC is pretty much the reason why Microsoft exists. Altair BASIC, Applesoft Basic, MBASIC, Atari BASIC, Commodore BASIC, BASICA, GWBASIC, AmigaBasic, QuickBASIC, Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications, ...
Virtually every home / personal computer shipped (in the U.S.) during the early 1980s, including the original IBM PC, had Microsoft software in ROM. Those that didn't usually came with a derivative of Microsoft BASIC as part of the operating system. This factor should not be underestimated.
Yeah, I know. I was thinking only about operating systems and completely forgot about the real roots of MS. Atari BASIC was the first language I ever programmed on. I remember just entering random PEEKS and POKES to see what they would do.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Modded troll because I implied that Microsoft enhances things. LMAO! /.
Welcome to
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
The author was only there from '97 to '04. There was nothing unintentional about it. If you know their history you know this. Their restrictive licensing began in the '80s. For example, early on they made license deals with manufacturers, e.g. Dell and Gateway. What that came down to was the manufacturer had to pay a fee whether or not a PC shipped with an MS OS. So what did they do? Ship only MS OS on their machines. MS was locking out the competition as as fast as possible.
This is also the company that said, It's not done until Lotus won't run".
Ballmer earning profits? He lead MS into their first ever period of losses. Now only remediated by Windows 7. Vista was a train wreck.
Being a monopoly has done what it always does; t makes a company fat, sloppy, lazy, and unimaginative.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
You cant convert Windows to ASM because of x86-64 and Itanium.
Both of which have different instruction sets to plain x86.
"You cant convert Windows to ASM because of x86-64 and Itanium. Both of which have different instruction sets to plain x86." - by jonwil (467024) on Thursday February 11, @08:28PM (#31108370)
Why not though? IF performance gains aren't obtainable anymore via better engines/algorithms... then, why NOT move the code (or as much as possible of it) to Assembly code instead of C/C++? This is NOT "undoable" on MS' part (though it would be a MAJOR PAIN & EFFORT, I can concede that).
That alone would probably quite easily "eke" another 10-20% (at least) performance boost out of Windows of ANY KIND/VERSION, & right off the bat, doing that alone.
The reason I note this?
Well, that is because it was how I heard a how MS got LARGE part of how they "got more" performance out of the far older Windows 3.x series: Going "straight asm" as much as possible (or, so I heard tell in the "dim days of yore", circa 15-16++ yrs. back), vs. using C/C++ as the base code for much of it.
Still: I concede, that You have a point, & that it'd mean more than just doing a conversion for 32-bit processors today. I wasn't thinking about 64-bit (so, point taken) but... that doesn't mean that changing to assembly level code, vs. C/C++, on the Itanium or other 64-bit (or hybrids) chips is "undoable" either!
(Only REAL question is, would it worth the effort & dollars that'd have to be expended (because as we all know from the world of business, there is a matter of "ROI"... would gaining another immediate say, 20% gain, be worth changing over the code of an entire OS for the dollars spent in the doing of it?)).
APK
P.S.=> It's just a thought on MS doing a build of a modern Windows (such as Windows 7) in pure or NEAR pure ASM code for x86 (or variants possibly, but I'd think that'd matter most for gamers actually as far as performance nuts go out there)...
ALSO - I still think that MS would be much better served by going to a "security hardened" model of Windows (per my 1st of my 2 suggestions in my previous posts' "p.s." section @ its termination to which you replied to here)!
Why?
Well, then they would put the responsibility onto the end users out there, letting them know the risks of various things they face by "turning said things on", & thus, letting users assume the responsibility of "turning on" the things in computers that are risky today, such as Javascript &/or ActiveX (as just a couple examples thereof)...
I mean, hey - Let's face it: Those tools are "the harbingers of doom" in a GOOD 90% or better of today's exploits upon end-users worldwide... apk
IBM
Revenue: US$ 95.757 billion (2009)
Operating income: US$ 17.012 billion (2009)
Net income: US$ 13.425 billion (2009)
Total assets: US$ 109.023 billion (2009)
Total equity: US$ 22.637 billion (2009)
Microsoft
Revenue: US$ 58.437 billion (2009)
Operating income: US$ 20.363 billion (2009)
Net income: US$ 14.569 billion (2009)
Total assets: US$ 77.888 billion (2009)
Total equity: US$ 39.558 billion (2009)
Pretty evenly matched, actually.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
1. that would be an absolute nightmare in terms of code maintainability, debugging, etc. Windows source code today is far larger than Windows 3.0 code
2. compilers have improved since the Windows 3.0 days, they're far better than humans at optimizing in many cases
3. Itanium architecture is explicitly parallel, writing assembly for that is completely different from writing x86, it's far from a simple conversion
4. Game performance is limited mostly by your GPU, and CPU usage by your OS is minimal compared to CPU usage by the game itself. Gamers won't see much benefit from this.
The effort required to write and maintain the code in assembly is so great that it's infeasible in practice, and you wouldn't really get that much benefit from doing it.
If you really wanted to do hardware-specific optimizations today, you'd probably be better off finding parts of the code where you can execute things in parallel. You could get good performance benefits from multicore processors.