Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

Post by RC_ITR » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 7:13 PM UTC

apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #222

palijer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile was aborted due to anti-trust complaints if I recall correctly. The original purchase of Rite Aid by Walgreens was aborted due to similar concerns, although that one ended in a revised partial acquisition anyway. The Staples acquisition of Office Depot/Office Max was stopped as well on anti-trust grounds. They also blocked a merger of Nasdaq and NYSE. Those are all since 2010. I'm sure…

Post by zeusk » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 7:14 PM UTC

HeavyStorm wrote: post #646

andrewparker wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creation layer of the stack: Unity or Unreal.

Visual Studio is still there, although losing market share

Post by zjaffee » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 7:21 PM UTC

xhrpost wrote: post #655

I have to wonder how much investing in some of today's tech behemoths comes down to viewing them more as a holding company / investment firm and less about their original core products. Microsoft has lost tons of desktop share over the last decade, this should have been a death signal for them but instead amazing acquisitions like Mojang, GitHub, ActBliz have pushed them to an amazing market cap. Similar with FB loos…

Post by sylens » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 7:22 PM UTC

JAlexoid wrote: post #450

kungito wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are still missing a mobile platform and that's why I believe they will retry within the next few years

I don't think they will. There's no point. There is a stable duopoly, where Microsoft can reap the benefits of competition between the two, without wasting any resources. May not be best for consumer - really great for business. (especially, if courts hold that Apple/Google cannot outright ban apps from their stores)

Post by dawsmik » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 7:22 PM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #560

curiousllama wrote: post #315

It's wild how Microsoft has been able to vertically integrate gaming. They now own the distribution (Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass), the games (Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft + what they owned before), the OS (Windows, Xbox), the hardware (Xbox, many PCs), and the back end compute (Azure). The only thing they're missing, the network bandwidth, is mostly a commodity anyway. That's a heck of a moat.

People may be flooding into vertical integration, though the history of that isn’t great. (Look at AOL/TimeWarner or Verizon/AOL/Tumblr/Yahoo) All it takes is missing one generation and the house of cards gets written down. Someone can create the next generation blockbuster for a lot less than $69bln. To argue against myself, they’ve become a lot better at picking trends since Balmer left too.