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how do you think the laws should be changed to prevent this?
I'm not a business law type person. Something like, any business with a valuation above, say, $100B (number pulled from ass) should be broken up.
Dayum. Such cash.
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Nadella transformed a company that was at risk of turning into the next IBM into the 2nd most valuable company in the world. Where have you been the past 9 years of his tenure?
I am betting this is not going to last. Their core products are losing customers.
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I would hope so, I dont see activision blizzard being a great acquistion.
Hopefully they fire most of the management, retain what technical talent they decide, and effectively reboot the entire company.
The most important question I have is: will they replace Bobby Kotick? EDIT: "Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard. [...] he and his team will maintain their focus on driving efforts to further strengthen the company’s culture." Shame on you, Microsoft.
Congratulations to Phil Spencer, who started out leading an upstart team at Microsoft for a new game console called "Xbox" and is now "CEO of Microsoft Gaming" - a Microsoft Senior Leadership position. Oh, and he now leads the third biggest gaming company on the planet: > When the transaction closes, Microsoft will become the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony. It will be interes…
> [...] if Satya and the Board spin off gaming into an independent company at some point. I certainly think this should happen. The trillion dollar giants should not span multiple industries. They have absurd monopoly power and can make growing your own niche impossible. Why does a cloud computing / operating system vendor / hardware manufacturer / business software / developer tooling company also own the third bigg…
So they built their own, and Comcast started suing them. A lot of stupid lobby fights later, and EPB Fiber Optics became a separate company with a loan from EPB (power company). Both wholly owned by the City of Chattanooga. EPB had to keep all power monies and all internet monies completely seperate in order to operate; otherwise, they would have too much of a competitive advantage over Comcast.
For the customer, it's just EPB, but for legalize and accountants, it's two completely separate companies, and money isn't allowed to go from the power division to the internet division and vice versa.
Imagine if these conglomerates had to do similar type of accounting. I don't know if that would be a positive for the customer/consumer, but it's an interesting thought exercise. Amazon might even consider shutting down quite a bit of e-commerce if they couldn't subsidize it with AWS...
I don't really understand these acquisitions made by Microsoft, first Mojang, then Bethesda and now Activision. Is Microsoft trying to revive these companies or it's just trying to leech of the market? At this moment, Activision is living out of in-game purchases, not making good games. Bethesda was almost dead when they bought it. >Legendary games, immersive interactive entertainment and publishing expertise acceler…
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I think for gaming this is pretty negative that everything is consolidated under large developers. I also don't think that the atmosphere under Microsoft will be better than under Activision. I hope PC gaming can detach from Microsoft as soon as possible to be honest.
> I hope PC gaming can detach from Microsoft as soon as possible to be honest In what way is PC gaming attached to Microsoft? Microsoft Game Studios doesn't have a lot of market share in PC games besides Minecraft, and the industry is very diverse. Most games happen to run on Windows, but apart from DirectX they have resisted every attempt from Microsoft to use that in any way. If PC gaming is attached to anyone it's…
Wow, that sucks. They should acquire someone with a bigger catalogue!
Congratulations to Phil Spencer, who started out leading an upstart team at Microsoft for a new game console called "Xbox" and is now "CEO of Microsoft Gaming" - a Microsoft Senior Leadership position. Oh, and he now leads the third biggest gaming company on the planet: > When the transaction closes, Microsoft will become the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony. It will be interes…
With these kind of acquisitions, other companies are going to find it very hard to compete with Game Pass. I think we'll look back in 10 years and wonder why antitrust regulators did nothing, but it may be too late by then.
I looked around for a while, a d I can't actually find a list of any mergers that antitrust regulations actually prevented. I'm assuming some survivor bias is involved here and we don't hear about the ones that stopped early, but it seems that what I and most folks assume antitrust regulations do is different than what actually happens. I remember the Sirius/XM merge and how those were the only two players in the mar…