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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!
"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.
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!
I've been able to get pro-Microsoft articles posted by kdawson...
The idea that articles would be pro or con seems insane to me. What ever happened to journalism? It seems like everyone has decided it is more profitable to have rabid, emotionally driven dichotomies to sell "news" rather than just strong, objective, fact-based journalism.
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.
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.
Entire article in one post:
Fast Search & Transfer (January 2008)
While much of Microsoft's recent push into search has been on the consumer side with Bing, Microsoft's $1.2 billion acquisition of Norway-based Fast Search & Transfer has helped the software giant make inroads in the enterprise search market. More than 10,000 of Microsoft's enterprise customers have deployed Fast's technology to date, and Microsoft's free Search Server Express product has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, according to Whittinghill.
Fast's enterprise search technology will also be part of Office 2010, Whittinghill says. Office 2010 is being offered to selected testers as a Release Candidate, and is slated for launch by June.
Danger (February 2008)
At this point in time, a week before the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, it's hard to look at Microsoft's $500 million pickup of Danger, developer of the software and services stack for the Sidekick, as anything but a disappointment.
Much of the Danger talent landed in Microsoft's Premium Mobile Experiences (PMX) team, a group within the Mobile Communications Business (MCB) of the Entertainment and Devices Division. PMX not only was responsible for a Sidekick outage last October that caused T-Mobile subscribers to lose data, it's also leading Microsoft's Pink smartphone project, which has been rumored to be on the rocks for several months. Many former Danger staffers have either been laid off or left Microsoft of their own accord.
According to Whittinghill, the goal of the Danger acquisition was to combine all the different Microsoft experiences, including MSN, Zune and Windows Live Search For Mobile, and "start creating a connected entertainment and communications experience." Microsoft may still be planning to launch Pink, and it may actually fulfill this vision, but right now, the Danger deal looks like a dud.
Kidaro (March 2008)
Microsoft's acquisition of Israel-based Kidaro, reportedly for $100 million, added desktop virtualization to its portfolio and gave the company the all important backward compatibility necessary for upgrading to new versions of Windows.
Kidaro is now called Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), which is essentially Windows XP Mode with management capability layered on top. Kidaro's technology allows companies to continue using legacy business apps after Windows upgrades, and it's also well suited to mobile environments with large numbers of notebook PCs, where the ability to deploy and move PC images quickly and easily is an advantage.
Kidaro is part of Microsoft's Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), which includes desktop and application virtualization, inventory services, System Center desktop error monitoring and group policy management tools, and is only available as part of a Software Assurance subscription.
DATAllegro (September 2008)
Microsoft deepened its data warehousing portfolio with its September 2008 acquisition of DATAllegro, an Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based firm whose technology allows SQL Server to handle massive amounts of data. "They allow you to scale out to hundreds of terabytes," says Whittinghill.
The DATAllegro deal, which reportedly cost $275 million, was Microsoft's entry to the data warehousing space. According to Whittinghill, Microsoft was interested both in DATAllegro's talent and its core IP. Given the growing role that data warehousing and business intelligence are playing within the enterprises, and the rapid increase in the amount of data enterprises are generating, this acquisition will continue paying dividends for the next several years.`
Calista Technologies (January 2008)
Microsoft's acquisition of Calista brought in a collection of GPU virtualization technologies that stream multimedia (Flash, Silverlight, Windows Media and Direct3D) content from a Hyper-V host to thick and thin clients.
"Calista provided the essential technology for increasing the ease of experience around watching video and
This signature serves no purpose other than to help you see which posts were made by me.
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
My plan worked flawlessly
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+