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The largest acquisitions by Big Tech companies
- RocketSyntax 7y agoYouTube, Twitch, and IG were all wayyy too small. I guess Snap's no go decision on acquisition seems less silly now.
- jedberg 7y agoThat's really hard to judge, because a lot of those company's growth came after their acquisition, and we have no idea how much the parent company contributed to that either through marketing and driving traffic, and/or through capital resources and/or through talent.
- httpz 7y agoIt seems like that now but when Twitch or IG got acquired, I remember thinking the price was way too high.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chirau 7y agoI would love to hear people's opinions on what was the best acquisition for each of these companies...and perhaps the worst too.
- opportune 7y agoI think YouTube and Instagram have probably been the best so far. LinkedIn is also very strong but because it was sold for such a high price it can’t 100x the way YouTube and Instagram likely have
- nostrademons 7y agoAndroid was also pretty key for Google.
- richardwhiuk 7y agoMicrosofts acquisition of LinkedIn seems the most dubious.
- opportune 7y agoLinkedIn makes a lot of money, $5.3b in 2018, and is growing rapidly. It’s also by far the best product in its class
- maximusjesse 7y agoI was originally skeptical about Amazon's Twitch acquisition. However, in recent years, they've seem to integrate the product fairly well into their ecosystem. I feel for an acquisition less than $1b, Twitch is a steal in hindsight. Not sure how much money Twitch makes, but the ecosystem and users only seems to be growing.
- dumbfoundded 7y agoWell the Next acquisition brought back Jobs
- fortylove 7y agoIt's crazy to think that Amazon acquired Whole Foods for less than Facebook acquired WhatsApp. Not on the list, IBMs 34b acquisition of Red Hat.
- finphil 7y agoGood points :) I guess the IBM / Red Hat situation was left out because the mapping focused on FAAMG companies.
- ignoramous 7y agoWhatsApp essentially displaced Facebook as a Social Media platform of choice whilst also spelling doom for SMS, and VoIP in one fell swoop. WhatsApp, if it was an independent company like Larry Page pleaded with them to be, would have been the next $100B tech company. I feel the founders cashed out when there was no need for them to, plus they couldn't exercise the autonomy they were promised post-acquisition.
- cstejerean 7y agoAnd how would they have monetized WhatsApp for it to be worth $100B?
- dumbfoundded 7y agoProbably like WeChat, through a bunch of integrations with service providers & payment providers. IE, text to get a pizza.
- csomar 7y agoLink to the original article (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-big-five-largest-acquisitions-by-tech-company/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-big-five-largest-acquis...) which has more data. The current link serves no purpose.
- gkolli 7y agoSurprising, based on how large Apple is, its acquisitions aren't as large as other tech companies. Thoughts?
- rm_-rf_slash 7y agoIt appears that Apple prefers to purchase IP to integrate with their existing product lines (like siri), rather than to buy up competitors for the purposes of horizontal integration (like Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp).
- altmind 7y agoMS buying aQuantive for 6.3Bil and then doing nothing with their products and resources always bogged me on how un-resourceful corporations can be. 6.2Bil of this acquisition was written off in 2012, 5 years after the purchase.
- psds2 7y agoNo mention of Dell spending $67bn to acquire EMC and with it VMware.