The author gives a very one sided picture why such investments make sense. Well, he earns a lot of money in this business. I would be more interested how many

The author gives a very one sided picture why such investments make sense. Well, he earns a lot of money in this business. I would be more interested how many of these acquisitions are successful? I remember Nokia buying Navteq for €5.7 billion (US$8.1 billion) in 2007. And selling Here for €2.8 billions in 2015 (US$3.1 billion, US$2.9 billion according to another source, I didn't check the exchange rates, 200 million seem to be peanuts in the context). Inflation-adjusted the numbers would look worse. Burning more than half of the acquisition value did obviously not save Nokia's mobile business on the way. While we are at it Microsoft bought Nokia's mobile business just to close it down 3 years later and writing off US$7.6 billion. Google bought Motorola phones for US$12.5 billion to sell it off for US$2.91 billion. All this demonstrates is that corporations have immoral amounts of money to gamble with. The little droplet we can contribute to avoiding this is trying to spend our peanuts in favor of smaller businesses. (Yes, I still have a Skype, a LinkedIn and a github account)