The Economist April 17th 2021 pp57-58 |Business|Microsoft| “Method in the madness” “Why the world’s biggest software firm looks increasingly acquisitive”
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Microsoft (MSFT) After “having provided textbook examples of what not to do, most notably after buying Nokia…and Skype…it has learned how to integrate targets successfully. MSFT “has become a giant computing cloud that can digest any data and offer any service.” Currently Nuance is being pursued for $20 bn, MSFT’s second largest acquisition ever (LinkedIn 2016 for $26 bn), and brings to the table patents, “speech recognition software and a health-care platform used in 77% of American Hospitals.” These new technologies are applicable across MSFT and also “will beef up Microsoft’s ‘health cloud’.” No doubt, besides Nuance, MSFT has term sheets, in wait, for many other companies including Pinterest and Discord (Online Chat). With $132 bn of cash on the sidelines, MSFT has been if anything cautious as it spent only $33 bn on “big acquisitions in the last four years, compared with $64 bn on research and development.”