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Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- adler0901 5y agoHopefully they'll fix Nuance's terrible website and support.
- glutamate 5y agoHopefully they will fix a couple of bugs in Dragon as well. I really would like them to have a release focused on bug fixes rather than greater accuracy
- mkl 5y agoMore than a couple. It's the most unstable and unreliable program I use on a regular basis.
- pc86 5y agoAre the bugs ML-related or with the app more generally? I've never used Dragon but I'm pretty interested in the TTS space.
- glutamate 5y agoFeels like the app, you often have to restart it, highly variable (by orders of magnitude) latency, sometimes won't start at all
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoIf they got around to improving the python hooks too, that'd be pretty fantastic.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- struct 5y agoWhat does Microsoft get out of this? They already have TTS and deep learning transcription, what technical capabilities does Nuance have that they don't have already (or can't develop for substantially less than $20B?)
- seibelj 5y agoNuance owns a ton of patents and are extremely litigious.
- bitwize 5y agoProbably a crapton of patents for voice recognition. Also, if you cannot operate a keyboard and must communicate by speech to operate a computer, it's pretty much Dragon NaturallySpeaking or GTFO. Integrating NaturallySpeaking tech into Windows would be a huge boon and further cement Windows as the os to have if you have disabilities.
- lunixbochs 5y agoI have users who have intentionally switched their speech engine from the latest version of Dragon to Talon, for both dictation and commands. Talon is cross platform and directly targets accessibility use cases (far more than just speech input).
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoI switched from dragon to talon a while back... and then back to dragon :-\ Not to bash though. You've built a great product!
- lunixbochs 5y agoI'm specifically talking about the new Conformer model, available in early access as of ten days ago. What you tried was likely the previous (circa 2018) model, which is much less accurate than Conformer. This is a demo of Conformer in Talon: https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1378159234861264896 https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1378159234861264896
- makhmedov 5y agoI think GitHub got better since the acquisition.
- rvz 5y agoOr much worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26667101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26667101
- easton 5y agoIsn’t GitHub still in AWS though? Seems like they’ve just been pushing buggier software lately, perhaps that’s an effect of being under Microsoft but it also might just be an effect of growing faster.
- m12k 5y agoAnd LinkedIn is still terrible, but no more so than they were before the acquisition. Then again Skype just got worse and worse and Wunderlist just got absorbed by the borg cube. So a mixed record, but at least seems to have been getting better in more recent times.
- nicbou 5y agoWunderlist was killed off before Microsoft ToDo achieved feature parity. The web version wouldn't reliably let me log in. After a few months I switched to Todoist and never looked back.
- imdsm 5y agoI must disagree. From a UX side alone, they've regressed, but then there have been more outages since the acquisition than before.
- globular-toast 5y agoGot any specifics to back up that feeling?
- 5y ago
- bombcar 5y agoIs it just me or have speech recognition platforms like Siri actually gone backwards in the last few years (roughly coinciding with the AI/ML craze)? It feels (anecdata) that Siri is doing a bit better on voice to tex when sending messages but much worse on simple commands like “turn off living room lights”.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoSiri is brain-damaged. I am constantly disappointed with how stupid she is compared to Alexa and the gap is widening. I try to keep things as simple as possible with her because she always disappoints me. I wish Apple would open up a tiny bit of those 200 billion in cash reserves on improving Siri.
- dominotw 5y ago>she always disappoints me siri doesnt default to female voice anymore.
- sgerenser 5y agoDoesn’t default to male voice either, you will have to choose. I bet most people keep it what it always was (female in the US, some countries like UK were male voices).
- JustSomeNobody 5y agoOh come on! That was announced like 2 weeks ago!
- saagarjha 5y agoIn a beta no less.
- eCa 5y agoSiri is a female name[1] so it makes sense to use ’she’ when humanizing her. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_(given_name) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_(given_name)
- geewee 5y agoAfter having tried Microsoft's automatic captioning on Microsoft Stream which is akin in accuracy to monkeys typing something random on a typewriter, I think this seems like a good choice.
- nradov 5y agoLive captioning in Microsoft Teams isn't terrible.
- rvz 5y agoNow Nuance. It seems Microsoft is still actively continuing to buy more companies and it seems Discord is still on the menu.
- traveler01 5y agoIt's actually kinda scary to see Microsoft stretching its tentacles like this. Only this year they bought Bethesda, Nuance and there are rumours about them buying Discord and other gaming studios. Microsoft's influence is growing deeply...
- tupac_speedrap 5y agoWhere is the antitrust lawsuit? Microsoft got done for this before (bundling Internet Explorer with Windows) and if you look at where they are now buying out businesses and using dark patterns in Windows 10 to make people use Edge as well as implying it is a fundamental part of the OS they are way beyond was acceptable years ago.
- traveler01 5y agoYou're right. They've been abusing their position and power for years now and the Edge situation with Windows 10 is getting much worse after the Chromium update. They force you to use the said browser with some features, like when you use the search function it automatically opens Edge browser, even if you have another browser set as default. What's next? Removing the option to set defaults for browsers? It's one of the reasons I'm willing to buy a MacBook next...
- reducesuffering 5y agoThey're looking at ~$50B / yr in profit, only about ~$17B that's paid out in dividends. What else are they going to do with $33B every year?
- GekkePrutser 5y agoAnd Ubuntu! Totally expecting that in the news at this point.
- someperson 5y agoSeveral years ago I used a Nuance product named Dragon NaturallySpeaking that had speech-to-text capability and adds verbal accessibility features on Windows platforms (eg, say "Open Word", speak your document aloud, then "Close Word") I had no idea they had enough sales to justify a $20 billion valuation. Though to be fair, Microsoft tends to acquire companies at high price tags (eg, Skype, LinkedIn, Minecraft) compared to eg, Apple's acquisition strategy of smaller technology focused companies (other than Beats headphones) like P.A. Semi and PrimeSense. EDIT: Other comments say Nuance's patent portfolio may greatly contribute to its valuation.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoBear in mind, Nuance is often the voice technology behind other companies' speech-based products too. Nuance technology originally powered Siri, for example.
- qntmfred 5y agoNuance itself was actually spun out of an organization called SRI (note the resemblance to the name Siri)
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoThis is incorrect. Nuance was a company that originated decades ago, SRI did build Siri, using Nuance's speech technology, but Nuance itself did not spin out of SRI.
- qntmfred 5y agohttps://www.sri.com/hoi/natural-language-speech-recognition/ https://www.sri.com/hoi/natural-language-speech-recognition/ > SRI spun off market leader Nuance Communications to commercialize the technology https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-president-of-sri-ventures-on-bringing-siri-to-life https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-president-of-sri-ventures-on-bri...
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoThis is really, really unfortunate. One of the last on-device speech companies is being bought out and moved into Microsoft's cloud division. Expect nobody to be willing to sell you speech recognition without a cloud subscription now.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoYou don't know their roadmap or plans for Nuance yet you attribute motive.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoMicrosoft's focus here is pretty well known: They've retired the Windows Speech SDK almost entirely in favor of Azure services, which is where the Microsoft Speech team has moved to, and the announcement explicitly stated Microsoft is bringing this under their "Intelligent Cloud" segment.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoThey claimed two things. That this would be exclusively cloud and that nobody will sell you speech recognition without a subscription. I doubt this is all.
- lunixbochs 5y agoI'm in the on-device space, here's a recent demo of my engine for a niche use case (it also does large vocabulary dictation very well): https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1378159234861264896 https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1378159234861264896
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoI'll take a look! I am still looking for the right speech recognition setup for my needs. I wrote an app that largely expects text input of the spoken command, and I'd ideally like to have hotword detection + speech recognition that can be set up to output the detected command to my own software.
- itsbits 5y agoGitHub at 7.5 billion around 2019 looks like a steal.. weird other software giants didn't try for it..
- v7p1Qbt1im 5y ago100% they tried. Can‘t imagine Google and Amazon not wanting GitHub. But with regards to big acquisitions, MS is ironically and quite surprisingly able to fly under the radar in terms of antitrust. Literally every other tech company is not.
- intricatedetail 5y agoMicrosoft can see a lot of data which means they can have plenty of dirt on people involved in anti trust stuff. Beyond certain point companies can do what they want.
- sethhochberg 5y agoI'd guess its a bit less irony and more that by virtue of having already been through various high-profile antitrust investigations, MS is somewhat uniquely well positioned to understand how to avoid/manage similar scrutiny in the future.
- aloisdg 5y agoTrue GitHub is where the community is.
- CuriousPerson23 5y agoA lot of the giant companies are really concerned about anti-trust. Microsoft is under pressure too, but there would be an uproar if Google or Apple bought given their pressure around the app store. Having access to the code that writes the apps would be tough to pull off...
- itsbits 5y agotrue...Google does have similar product which surely could have caused more anti trust uproar..MS in this space luckily doesn't have such issues..
- varispeed 5y agoSo Microsoft can see your private repositories, your documents if you use Office, your personal files (one drive), your company communication (teams), now they will be able to listen what you talk about. Where is this going? Should we trust this company so much? I think companies like this should be split up.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoAnd the worst part, the deal is likely going to be approved (or they would not be announcing it). There's just _no way in hell_ the current political landscape allows "splitting up" a company when it is still allowing to grow it even further.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mikro2nd 5y agoYears ago, deep in the fine-print of the Skype ToU, was buried a clause in which anything you discussed via Skype granted to MS a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, etc. license to anything mentioned. Is that still there? (Haven't used Skype in many a long year, myself.) I always wondered why that clause didn't render Skype unusable for any business or prospective business conversation.
- kyberias 5y agoI find that very hard to believe.
- 1123581321 5y agoNo, that is standard language that gives a website the right to store and display content you post to it (e.g., to show your avatar on a profile page or show forum posts or chats.) Many websites use it; see this search for examples: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22any%20time%20you%20choose%20to%20upload%20or%20post%20User%20Submissions%22 https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22any%20time%20you%20... This is the text from Skype’s terms: “Notwithstanding any rights or obligations governed by the Additional Terms (as defined below) if, at any time you choose to upload or post User Submissions to the Skype Websites or through the Software (excluding Reports and excluding the content of your communications) you automatically grant Skype a non-exclusive, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, sub-licensable and transferable license of all rights to use, edit, modify, include, incorporate, adapt, record, publicly perform, display, transmit and reproduce the User Submissions including, without limitation, all trade marks associated therewith, in connection with the Skype Websites and Skype’s Software and Products including for the purpose of promoting or redistributing part or all of the Skype Websites and/or the Software or Products, in any and all media now known or hereafter devised. You also hereby grant each user of the Skype Website and/or Skype’s Software or Products a non-exclusive license to access your User Submission through the Skype Website and/or Software or Products and to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform and transmit such User Submissions solely as permitted through the functionality of the Skype Websites and/or Software or Products and pursuant to these Terms of Use. In addition, you waive any so-called “moral rights” in and to the User Submissions, to the extent permitted by applicable law.”
- endisneigh 5y agoOne thing I considered doing long ago was creating middleware to use NaturallySpeaking via an API and noticed in their license agreement they have the following: A license for the Software Package does not allow Licensee to use the Software Package on a server. I'm curious how well this would hold up in a court. I only mention this because Nuance is a pretty litigious organization. I imagine they were bought pretty much for the patents.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoThat seems quite common, I looked at a few PDF products a couple of years ago and they all wanted to license server installations individually whereas for workstations they are happy to offer a redistribution license.
- tapper 5y agoPlenty of blind people would get behind this if it happened. https://t.co/vQIch9PLiW https://t.co/vQIch9PLiW The skype thing was a clusterfuck. I loved skype casts and they fucked it all. Discorde is OK now, but dam does it make me feel old. I join a server and join a VC and here a bunch of 13 year olds. I have to leave because I am 38 and it's creepy to be talking to 13 14 yearolds on the internets at my age lol I made a server for tech nerds and people who like OpenWrt. https://discord.gg/KuNhWzvp5S https://discord.gg/KuNhWzvp5S.
- tinus_hn 5y agoSo unfair that you are forced with your arms twisted behind your back to spend that much money on such a terrible device! What a gyp!
- pinko 5y agoYou may not realize, but "gyp" is a bigoted ethnic slur. Please don't use it here or anywhere.
- thedevelopnik 5y agoYeah this is good to call out. A couple years ago I used it and got dogpiled for racism and I had to say “ok, I will stop using it, but who am I being racist against?” And I got educated, which was good, because I did not know it is a slur against Roma. A lot of people use it without knowledge of context, so adding the context is important.
- ArcturianDeath 5y agoSo you flagged their comment for something you aint and that wasnt directed at anyone? How infantile. Now, no one knows what they said.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoOh this is big, Nuance is not very well known to the public but they are indeed very big in speech recognition. We used their solution with automated support systems.
- raobit 5y agoTrue, i came to know people appreciating it here that it is better than siri,alexa in terms of speech recognition, is it really that good. Support system you mean IVR?
- 16bytes 5y agoFor those confused, this acquisition is due in large part by Nuance's dominance in healthcare related products. From Nuance's last earnings release[1]: “We are very pleased with the strong start to the fiscal year, as we delivered revenue and EPS above our guidance range expectations,” said Mark Benjamin, Chief Executive Officer at Nuance. “We continued to advance our strategic initiatives, accelerating our cloud transition across our core platforms in Healthcare and focusing on our AI-first approach in Enterprise. In Healthcare, we saw solid performance in our cloud-based offerings, growing cloud revenue 28% year-over-year. In particular, we benefited from strong performance in Dragon Medical & DAX Cloud revenue, which grew 22% year-over-year driven by the ongoing transition of our installed base to Dragon Medical One, as well as traction in international, ambulatory and community hospital markets. Enterprise delivered another record revenue quarter, up slightly from its previous record in Q1'20, driven by particularly strong demand for our Security & Biometrics solutions." Nuance has deep relationships built with nearly every health system in the US and beyond. This fits quite well with Microsoft's corporate focus. Yes, Nuance also has a lot of IP, but I wouldn't expect any consumer facing changes (e.g. Cortana) in the near term. [1] https://investors.nuance.com/download/EX%2099.1%20Press%20Release%20December%2031,%202020_FINAL.pdf https://investors.nuance.com/download/EX%2099.1%20Press%20Re...
- tootie 5y agoI'm pretty sure Nuance also does the Comcast Xfinity voice remotes. They are actually really well done. And it's a humongous customer to have your claws in.
- marktangotango 5y agoI have this and it really is quite remarkable. The entire voice integration in the x1 set top box is really polished. Other than the occasional "wow, this is pretty good for comcast!" I hadn't given it much thought until now.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y agoCan you remove the ads from the EPG?
- josefresco 5y agoIn other news, how did Pinterest go from $11B to $53 billion in roughly the last year? COVID-19 bump or something else?
- reducesuffering 5y agoThey really turned on monetization and the entire market was discounted 33% last year. Pinterest went from ~$250m revenue / quarter to tripling that in just 2 quarters. That's huge and unexpected that revenue would climb that high.
- CivBase 5y agoSpeech recognition in consumer electronics continues to be slow, unreliable, and a privacy nightmare. I can't tell you the last time I saw someone use it seriously. There are reasonable applications for it, but they are few and far between. I wonder what makes it worth $20B to MS. Top comment as I'm writing this says Nuance has a strong presence in the healthcare device market, but I'd be surprised if that alone was worth the purchase price.
- outside1234 5y agoTalking to Hololens?
- qwertox 5y agoI knew Nuance sounded very familiar, but when I googled it, the news were about an AI company, which confused me. DragonDictate / Dragon NaturallySpeaking, that's why it sounded so familiar.
- alberth 5y agoThis is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26774367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26774367 Note: everyone is getting this acquisition wrong. It's not about Dragon and their Speech-to-Tex. This is all about owning an enterprise Communication Platform (e.g. Contact Center, etc). I'll repost my previous comment from the other HN thread below: ---- Everyone is wanting to take on Twilio. Last September, Microsoft first announced their Communication Cloud. A huge focus at Twilio now is moving upstream to the Call Center, where Nuance is a significant player. So Microsoft picking up Nuance makes sense. It’s clear Microsoft sees communication services as a strategic core part of their business. (Even at the consumer / gamer level with the rumored Discord acquisition talks) https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/22/microsoft-challenges-twilio-with-the-launch-of-azure-communication-services/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/22/microsoft-challenges-twili...
- ignoramous 5y ago> Everyone is wanting to take on Twilio. Well then we can expect Microsoft to swoop in for Twilio any year now.
- alberth 5y agoGiven that TWLO market cap is $62B at the moment I wrote this comment, and Microsoft would have to pay a premium over that current valuation, I doubt they have the stomach to purchase someone for $70+ billion. And given that Jeff Lawson, is both he founder and CEO of TWLO - it's not entirely clear he would sell (unless the number is just so high, he has the fiduciary requirement that he has too - in which case I assume that would be north of $100B+)
- ignoramous 5y agoI'd presume $2T in MarketCap could buy you multiple Twilios even at $100B. MSFT isn't shy from making large purchases unlike Amazon and Apple: They take such massive bets comparatively frequently.
- Marciplan 5y ago
- yalogin 5y agoI am confused how speech recognition tech is worth 20 billion. It’s not even on the most popular platforms like iPhone, android or the desktops even. Can someone shed some light on this?
- ignoramous 5y ago"Enterprise sales" and "health care": https://investors.nuance.com/download/NUAN+%28Nuance+Communications+Inc.%29++%2810-K%29+2020-11-19.pdf_.pdf https://investors.nuance.com/download/NUAN+%28Nuance+Communi...
- ghc 5y ago> September 15, 2005 — ScanSoft acquired and merged with Nuance Communications, of Menlo Park, California, for $221 million. > October 18, 2005 — the company changed its name to Nuance Communications, Inc. So Nuance was worth ~$220MM at the time of acquisition. I'm sure it's worth a lot more now but ScanSoft acquired like 50 other companies too, including old voice recording giant Dictaphone.
- yelloo 5y agoa little over a decade ago i contracted for nuance working on a speech-to-text project for cell phone voicemail, either att or verizon. the job was literally listening to actual customers' voicemails and transcribing them (or correcting auto-transcriptions) into the system. literally 6 to 8 hour shifts of pure mind numbing work. we were told nothing about the tech behind it but I wonder if any of that work compounded into some of their in-use tech today, or if it was all just throw away. pointless story aside, their enterprise valuation at the time was a little under 20% of what it is today, and the company remained mostly the same until 2 years ago. wonder what the catalyst was for their 5x valuation growth?
- raobit 5y agoKind of data cleaning , any idea what the tech was?
- killjoywashere 5y agoAm I the only doc who despises Nuance? Dragon is definitely Microsoft-style software: lots of exposed features with defaults randomly set to "what no one would want, ever". Nevermind the core algorithm never really seemed to work well for me.
- bjt2n3904 5y agoWhat does an all cash deal of $20bn look like? I'm assuming it's really just an ACH transaction or something? There's not a convoy of armored cars with silver briefcases or anything... Is there?
- aembleton 5y agoIt means that Microsoft are giving money in exchange for shares of Nuance instead of giving Microsoft Stock in exchange for Nuance Stock.
- Maven911 5y agoFor those wondering some of Nuance strengths in speech: Multiple award winning Very domain oriented and not just general speech Supports many languages They have also had a boost in stock with covid and more people using remote speech services
- somethingAlex 5y agoI'm not super deep into the world to NLP, but from what I have kept up with, it seems that the state-of-the-art is almost constantly open-sourced. I understand certain companies have personal relationships already built which may be what MS is after more so than the IP, but isn't there a "canonical" way of building a, for example, speech to text system for your phone? Is there really a lot of NLP IP hidden behind corporate walls at this point? I just assumed Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, etc were all using the same model architectures. Genuine question, can anyone shed some light?
- gogopuppygogo 5y agoThe hardest part of running a 10 mile marathon for most people is the last mile. Lots of amazing open source out there but the difference between 90% accuracy and 99.7% accuracy can be very difficult to obtain. Not to mention, quantified data sets, especially medical ones, can hold immense value.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoI recently went through a ton of speech to text engines to test them. There are a lot of open source research projects as well as paid products, including amazon and google's paid products, which I assumed would be paying for the best of the best. Dragon (nuance's products) blew them out of the water in my experience. I was very surprised. Sentence error rate is still pretty shit across the board, so tiny improvements still make a massive difference in usability.
- raobit 5y agois Dragon really used in large scale enterprise, unlike siri,alexa for home automation, but i am hearing dragon let alone nuance famous for its AI product for the first time
- ionwake 5y agoThere is only one English "conversational" voice that I see ( which seems to be the best). Is there a way to make the others "conversational" if not, is Zoe the best example? Did you find any competing product that came close? Thank you
- msie 5y agoI'm shocked at the value of Pinterest (53 billon?).
- dalbasal 5y agoI think a lot of big acquisitions make "sense," given the current market. The most successful companies have lots of cash, high share prices, and amazing cash cows. They could borrow for (almost) free, so resources are practically unlimited. Their R&D is already well funded. Most of their big, growth oriented endeavours are not cash-constrained. There are usually no factories to build or production to scale up. Google tried "20% time." They tried "let many flowers grow." Those things seemed ambitious at 2007-scale. In 2021 terms... new flowers need to be S&P 500 companies to represent growth, instead of just clutter. "Meaningful growth," for Alphabet, is a big number. How else does a MSFT, Google or (especially) FB put $20bn to work? Acquiring "just works." Of course, there are in-house alternatives. Waymo is an in-house investment by Alphabet that's bigger than this Nuance acquisition... especially if you consider the $bns Waymo will continue to need until some unknown future date. Self driving is looking more hopeful (certainly to investors) than it was when waymo started.... but waymo is still a dubious investment. Consider that Google could have bought any car company, for about as much as waymo will cost eventually. Car companies have loans, so you could quibble the math... but details. Acquiring is easy. The path of least resistance wins >50% of the time. We have that dynamic here, both in the human/managers sense and in the arbitrage-like incentives in the market currently.
- bombcar 5y agoAcquiring is a simple way to show the Board/Shareholders that you're "doing something" - but I suspect it's rarely very successful in the long run. Unless you acquire a business that ACTUALLY provides some synergies you're just on the path of transitioning from a successful company to a poor imitation of Berkshire Hathaway. It does have the advantage that you can "spin off" your acquisitions once they fail to do anything interesting (though this is more commonly seen in sunset industries/dying companies (see AOL, Compaq, etc)).
- CerealFounder 5y agoIts rarely the syngeries that make it work, instead its often they bought a business they leave alone that has much more room to grow.
- lhousa 5y agoOff topic but axios looks neat and tidy! I could read news every day. Is there anything similar that covers worldwide news?
- jonplackett 5y ago> The Burlington, Massachusetts-based company, for example, powered the speech recognition engine behind Apple's voice assistant, Siri. That is the last speech recognition engine I would ever want to buy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mrkramer 5y ago>Microsoft tried to buy TikTok's U.S. operations last year in a deal reportedly valued between $10 billion to $30 billion. >Reports suggest it's in advanced talks with gaming chat app Discord for a deal worth more than $10 billion. >A report in February suggested Microsoft was eyeing a takeover of Pinterest, worth $53 billion on the public market. Last September, it bought gaming giant ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion. Microsoft is in full yolo mode since all other big tech companies have antitrust lawsuit against them. Microsoft spent its time on the cross in the 1990s and early 2000s now they will acquire anything they can.
- CivBase 5y agoMS's strategy as of late seems to be buying their way inyo being competitive in every market instead of dominating a few markets. I suppose this gives them a great deal of stability and allows them to develop a massive ecosystem of interconnected products and services. It's still a concerning practice... but not as obviously unethical as the monopolistic behavior displayed by other big tech companies.
- mrkramer 5y agoThis was their strategy since always or since they achieved monopoly in PC OS market which ensured them huge profits which they used to acquire competitors or to break into some industry or niche. They would push acquired product or service to millions of Windows users meaning they had huge distribution channel and scale potential. Microsoft's first acquisition was in 1987 of Forethought Inc. or developers of what is now Microsoft PowerPoint and they bought them for only $14m. Today PowerPoint as a product and as a brand is worth billions.
- paxys 5y agoThe fact that none of these companies are competing with Microsoft also makes it easier. That's not the strategy Google, Facebook etc. normally use.
- mrkramer 5y agoMaybe they are not competing with them right now but they have aspirations to break into their industry and then compete with them. They figured out it was easier to acquire them than try to build it from the ground up.
- achow 5y agoThis is incredible for a company like Nuance. At the time of acquisition: Nuance: $20B, employee strength 6000. 3M/employee LinkedIn: 26B, employee strength ~12000. 2M/employee LinkedIn was much more larger, more 'visible' and perhaps better talent attractor than Nuance at the time of acquisition.
- xyst 5y agoIn the next decade, there will only be 3-4 companies that own everything tech. We will only have the illusion of choice
- drewda 5y agoFWIW, I thought Google had pouched all of Nuance's key technical staff years ago.
- Kye 5y agoPeople tell me I'm blunt sometimes but have you tried to price nuance lately? Doesn't come cheap.
- Zigurd 5y agoI am surprised at the amount of mention Dragon is getting here. It has been a long, and at times tragic road. I worked at a company that used Dragon's technology in a voice control product for the original Macintosh. Mostly, I worked on a Windows version for a multimedia architecture Intel was developing, which entailed the acquisition of Spectron for a DSP OS. I got to meet a lot of the people involved at other companies in the project, including the Jim and Janet Baker, who founded Dragon, and many people at Intel up to and including Andy Grove. It was remarkable that he took interest in what was a relatively small project that was also distant from Intel's core products. I also met Jo Lernout, the L in L&H, which played a role in subsequent tragic events for the Bakers. All those people, and most of the technologies from those days, are gone now. Dragon ended up a part of Nuance, which itself had been called ScanSoft, and, before that, was a part of Xerox that, if I recall correctly, was acquired by Xerox from Ray Kurzweil. ScanSoft became a roll-up of a large number of speech technology companies. One of them was Nuance, and the roll-up was rebranded Nuance. Another acquisition was L&H, which had collapsed due to a financial scandal, which blew up after L&H had acquired Dragon. The Bakers got screwed and sued Goldman, who did the L&H deal. They lost. And that is your capsule history of Nuance. Sorry to give short shrift to the acquired companies I have no firsthand knowledge of. I believe the real story of Microsoft buying Nuance is that Nuance owns an enormous number of patents.
- f0rklift 5y agoGreat buy for MSFT. Voice is the future of healthcare and they just bought the best player in the game.
- mwambua 5y ago$NUAN's spike from $45 on Friday makes sense. However, I'm having trouble figuring out why they currently trade at ~$53 given that the market knows that Microsoft will pay $56 for each share. (https://news.microsoft.com/2021/04/12/microsoft-accelerates-industry-cloud-strategy-for-healthcare-with-the-acquisition-of-nuance/ https://news.microsoft.com/2021/04/12/microsoft-accelerates-...) Any ideas on why that is?
- johncoogan 5y agoPricing in a small chance that the acquisition won't go through (maybe due to FTC clearance, but could be other due diligence related items).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dmingod666 5y agoI remember using Dragon NaturallySpeaking on a windows98 machine - it was considered pretty good even back then..
- qwertywert_ 5y agoJesus, can't companies just be the company they are y'know.
- sam_goody 5y agoWhat will this mean for Apple? Aside for Siri, Nuance voice is used for the Mac TTS engine, which I use quite heavily. In English, there are quite a few contenders for TTS, eg. Amazon. Apple can find another vendor. But in some languages it is Google voice or Nuance and there are no other games in town.
- unfocused 5y agoWe only buy Nuance Dragon Naturally speaking for our lawyers. It’s the best product out there. So maybe they want the Dragon technology.
- bsean95531 5y agoWell my comment is I would like to have all information on my account send to my new address Sean Brennan 100 elk valley rd. # 15 Crescent city Ca.95531 U.S.A. cell 1+(707)218-4485 email/ sbrennan716526@gmail.com/ sjb95531@gmail.com/brennansean95531@gmail.com thank you Sean Joseph Brennan
- idclip 5y agoRip.
- ncmncm 5y agoCan I just say here that these all-cash transactions really suck? Here you have been carefully exercising your stock options every month so you can pay only long-term capital gains taxes, and avoid AMT, and then BAM! sorry, you just sold it all at once. "BZZZT. Sucker."
- serf 5y agoWhenever I think of Dragon I always remember the early versions (90s?) I used to have to use that required 1 or 2 hours of speech training. It felt weird reading 'Moby Dick' to a computer for an hour , but at the time there was no product that could even get near Dragon in any performance metric. Since natural language interpretation is such a widely used concept now I had taken it for granted that Dragon even existed anymore. I don't know much about the company, and I don't know much about the product anymore, but that kind of persistence and consistency in this field is admirable.
- Firehawke 5y agoIs it too early for me to be hoping that Microsoft will integrate Dragon into Windows and make the voice recognition actually work well?
- eagsalazar2 5y agoI interviewed there about 10 years ago. An interviewer actually asked me "how will you deal with constantly going to pointless meetings and politics ruining any hope of actually getting anything meaningful done here?" Lol.