How can one track these acquisitions? Does crunch base offer such a feature?
Apple buys a company every three to four weeks
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Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks
#102So ~15 companies a year? That doesn't sound outrageous for a company with billions and billions of dollars in the bank, and billions more coming in every quarter. edit: If anything there's probably immense pressure on Cook to buy buy buy more stuff. I don't think anyone inside Apple wants to have a repeat of stuff like old Apple maps or other products that just languished and died internally while external companies…
At some point, does it become silly for the biggest companies to attempt their own solutions instead of just buying the one with the most traction or best implementation? One example might be how Amazon never got into self-driving cars themselves, but then last year bought Zoox.
I work in health care. I also work for one of the biggest health care companies in the world. They are losing market share to smaller, more agile companies. Smaller companies who can whip out apps and solutions way faster than the company I work for.
Their solution is to buy the companies whose technology they want to leverage for their own, similar to what Apple is doing. This is a good tactic, but then creates another separate issue - how do you integrate all of these companies and their tech and employee's into your massive structure?
This has now created a huge bottleneck in that M&A (mergers and acquisitions) are tasked are buying companies and then having to take several years before they can fully integrate them into our company. It is a painfully slow process, but they still believe its faster to do it this way, then to try and build the tools and applications on their own.
I feel like the jury is out on whether this is a good long term strategy or simply replacing one problem for another.
Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not the price that necessarily matters but the market share, which is often represented in the price. A company like Facebook (a large social media corporation) buying WhatsApp (a large messaging app) creates an even bigger company in terms of influence on the market. Apple might be buying companies for their tech, but their acquisitions don't just automatically increase their influence or market share through c…
It's a smart business strategy to buy smaller companies with great potential, it probably has something to do with why Apple is the richest company on earth, but that strategy also snuffs out that potential company before it has a chance to reach the prodigious scale of a WhatsApp or a LinkedIn. Presumably, Apple knows how to pick winners, so it's likely that at least a small fraction of Apple's acquisitions would ha…
> Presumably, Apple knows how to pick winners, so it's likely that at least a small fraction of Apple's acquisitions would have gone on to become ubiquitous house-hold names had they not been sold.
Not necessarily. If you’re only interested in acquiring technology, the commercial success of prospective acquisitions isn’t particularly relevant.
Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks
#104Is that a lot? How many does a similarly positioned company buy, say Alphabet, Dell, or Cisco? Seems like every time I find a neat niche networking or security product I like, Cisco or someone ends up buying it. Context would’ve been helpful in this article.
Alphabet is faster. As Cory Doctorow mentioned in one of his talks, they buy companies more often than most people go to the grocery store.
Oh, also, the public rosters of companies bought by Google aren't accurate. I know because I worked for a company that was bought by Google. It was technically a "merger" and escaped some scrutiny that way? I'm hazy on the details but either way it doesn't show up in lists.
Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks
#105So ~15 companies a year? That doesn't sound outrageous for a company with billions and billions of dollars in the bank, and billions more coming in every quarter. edit: If anything there's probably immense pressure on Cook to buy buy buy more stuff. I don't think anyone inside Apple wants to have a repeat of stuff like old Apple maps or other products that just languished and died internally while external companies…
At some point, does it become silly for the biggest companies to attempt their own solutions instead of just buying the one with the most traction or best implementation? One example might be how Amazon never got into self-driving cars themselves, but then last year bought Zoox.
There's no point in buying an unrelated business that you're going to leave operating as usual - you might as well just invest that money on the stock market instead, or pay it out to your shareholders. So presumably if a company is buying a solution to X then it believes it can gain a competitive advantage by integrating X into the rest of its business.
Given that, I would've thought that the earlier you buy the thing, the easier it is to integrate it with the rest of your company and the quicker you start gaining the benefits of that. Waiting to buy the winner shouldn't be any cheaper than buying all the competitors in the field at the start, because it's no secret how everyone's doing. So the only reasons not to develop in-house from day 1 are if you're not as good at developing things as a small independent company, or there's some other advantage that you're missing, or the option value from the fact that small companies can go bankrupt on their own (but that's only really applicable if the business is capital-intensive).
Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you people not realize that they've created a peer-pressure device in the form of the iPhone by packaging SMS and iMessage into 1 app called "Messages"? How is that even legal?! https://www.gihosoft.com/iphone-tips/best-messaging-apps-ios...
I am well-aware of these. The issue is the joint-packaging. If we went hard on Microsoft for packaging IE and WMP into Windows, we should go equally ballistic about iMessage and SMS being fused in together. They should be broken up.
We didn't "go hard on" Microsoft for mere bundling of basic tools like media viewers and web browsers. It was because they were using that dominant position (which is perfectly fine to have) to behave anticompetitively (which is not).
Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks
#107So ~15 companies a year? That doesn't sound outrageous for a company with billions and billions of dollars in the bank, and billions more coming in every quarter. edit: If anything there's probably immense pressure on Cook to buy buy buy more stuff. I don't think anyone inside Apple wants to have a repeat of stuff like old Apple maps or other products that just languished and died internally while external companies…
Maps hasn’t languished at all.
This is true.
Apple Maps has improved significantly.
I still wouldn't trust it like I trust Google Maps though.
Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks
#108So ~15 companies a year? That doesn't sound outrageous for a company with billions and billions of dollars in the bank, and billions more coming in every quarter. edit: If anything there's probably immense pressure on Cook to buy buy buy more stuff. I don't think anyone inside Apple wants to have a repeat of stuff like old Apple maps or other products that just languished and died internally while external companies…
I'm just squarely keen on learning from their acquisition integrations team, that's where the magic happens to make any good use of these acquisitions.
Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because right now price is about the only criteria really considered today. You can stifle innovation and competition as long as the prices stay low.
It seems to me that Apple buys companies because they want to research and build a technology into their products, rather than eliminate competitors. It seems to me they’re more interested in the talent than the market. That kind of behavior I attribute to Facebook.
Regardless of the reason, the effect is still the same. Technology that could have been more broadly used is limited to Apple's ecosystem. Innovations might not happen, or happen later, because the company that would have made them is acquired and the talent is redirected to work on Apple products. Products that could have competed with Apple's products end up being part of Apple's products instead.
Re: Apple buys a company every three to four weeks
#110I'm beginning to think maintaining competitive markets requires broader criteria. Like any of super-majority share of: market volume, revenue within a market, influence over market, consumer harm, significant reduction in number of competitors.
You should read "Goliath" by Matt Stoller. In it he reviews the history of monopoly and how the US definition of it changed from the 1930s to the 1980s. Interesting historical read and it reinforced to me that both monopolies and competitive markets are societal constructs, not facts of nature. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/...
It's worth noting that he is a highly opinionated writer on the subject. Seemingly, his raison d'etre is to further antitrust -- though, in his case, it seems to be a vague, expansive and shifting notion.
He effectively just seems to be against any "big" business.