10 Microsoft Acquisitions and What They Mean Now 145
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CmdrTaco
from the if-you-can't-beat-it-buy-it dept.
from the if-you-can't-beat-it-buy-it dept.
FrankPoole writes "CRN takes a look at the past five years of Microsoft's acquisition history, which totals $13 billion and more than 7,000 new employees, and highlights 10 deals and how they've affected the software giant. While some larger acquisitions stand out for better or worse, such as Danger and aQuantive, there are some smaller, blink-and-you'll-miss-it deals that have proved pivotal for Microsoft's push into new areas such as virtualization. And Microsoft's recent acquisition track record may lend credence to the heavy criticism levied against the company by former employees like Dick Brass."
Re:What a weird list. (Score:2, Informative)
Bungie and Visio joined Microsoft in 2000, and Great Plains Software was purchased in 2001, all of which are before the scope of this list.
Danger, Danger! (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, Danger, the company that all the competent people abandoned, and ended messing up the storage/backup for all of T-Mobile Sidekick users' data?
How did that go anyway, I heard they managed to find a way to recover most of it?
Re:Smart buys (Score:3, Informative)
Windows 7 is just Microsoft playing catchup with Apple
OSX 10.6 has 2% of the market. Win 7 8%. [and in daily tracking a tad under 10%] Vista and Win 7 combined have 25% of the market. Top Operating System Share Trend [hitslink.com]
Ars Technica posted this interesting chart of Windows usage on Steam: [arstechnica.com]
19% of Steam users are running 64 bit Windows 7. "There are more users on Windows 7 64-bit than any other flavor of Windows, except for Windows XP 32-bit."
Re:I question his creditability (Score:4, Informative)
The claim that Apple II technique was proper subpixel antialiasing by design is debunked on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
Re:Slide Show warning (Score:2, Informative)
Entire article in one post:
Fast Search & Transfer (January 2008)
While much of Microsoft's recent push into search has been on the consumer side with Bing, Microsoft's $1.2 billion acquisition of Norway-based Fast Search & Transfer has helped the software giant make inroads in the enterprise search market. More than 10,000 of Microsoft's enterprise customers have deployed Fast's technology to date, and Microsoft's free Search Server Express product has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, according to Whittinghill.
Fast's enterprise search technology will also be part of Office 2010, Whittinghill says. Office 2010 is being offered to selected testers as a Release Candidate, and is slated for launch by June.
Danger (February 2008)
At this point in time, a week before the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, it's hard to look at Microsoft's $500 million pickup of Danger, developer of the software and services stack for the Sidekick, as anything but a disappointment.
Much of the Danger talent landed in Microsoft's Premium Mobile Experiences (PMX) team, a group within the Mobile Communications Business (MCB) of the Entertainment and Devices Division. PMX not only was responsible for a Sidekick outage last October that caused T-Mobile subscribers to lose data, it's also leading Microsoft's Pink smartphone project, which has been rumored to be on the rocks for several months. Many former Danger staffers have either been laid off or left Microsoft of their own accord.
According to Whittinghill, the goal of the Danger acquisition was to combine all the different Microsoft experiences, including MSN, Zune and Windows Live Search For Mobile, and "start creating a connected entertainment and communications experience." Microsoft may still be planning to launch Pink, and it may actually fulfill this vision, but right now, the Danger deal looks like a dud.
Kidaro (March 2008)
Microsoft's acquisition of Israel-based Kidaro, reportedly for $100 million, added desktop virtualization to its portfolio and gave the company the all important backward compatibility necessary for upgrading to new versions of Windows.
Kidaro is now called Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), which is essentially Windows XP Mode with management capability layered on top. Kidaro's technology allows companies to continue using legacy business apps after Windows upgrades, and it's also well suited to mobile environments with large numbers of notebook PCs, where the ability to deploy and move PC images quickly and easily is an advantage.
Kidaro is part of Microsoft's Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), which includes desktop and application virtualization, inventory services, System Center desktop error monitoring and group policy management tools, and is only available as part of a Software Assurance subscription.
DATAllegro (September 2008)
Microsoft deepened its data warehousing portfolio with its September 2008 acquisition of DATAllegro, an Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based firm whose technology allows SQL Server to handle massive amounts of data. "They allow you to scale out to hundreds of terabytes," says Whittinghill.
The DATAllegro deal, which reportedly cost $275 million, was Microsoft's entry to the data warehousing space. According to Whittinghill, Microsoft was interested both in DATAllegro's talent and its core IP. Given the growing role that data warehousing and business intelligence are playing within the enterprises, and the rapid increase in the amount of data enterprises are generating, this acquisition will continue paying dividends for the next several years.`
Calista Technologies (January 2008)
Microsoft's acquisition of Calista brought in a collection of GPU virtualization technologies that stream multimedia (Flash, Silverlight, Windows Media and Direct3D) content from a Hyper-V host to thick and thin clients.
"Calista provided the essential technology for increasing the ease of experience around watching video and
Re:Smart buys (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft has never "innovated" anything in its history, unless you count software licenseing or vendor agreements.
They even bought DOS [wikipedia.org] from someone else, for crying out loud.
The best case you could possibly make for them is WindowsNT. They developed that in-house, but they did it by hiring the team that created VMS away from DEC and setting them loose. It wasn't entirely a home-brewed thing.
This is just a story about Microsoft doing what they've always done for the last 30 years. If you want to find "innovation" at Microsoft, you have to look at their legal and marketing departments.