Tech’s Biggest Acquisition Stories

Mrs Dallaway said she would buy the flowers herself. All right, then today we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the big tech acquisition stories that we've had in the past. And this is prompted by a recent as of the recording of this podcast acquisition that made the news, you know, in in the last week. Really, I think one of the funny things about tech acquisitions is there, in a way, there's kind of two versions of tech acquisitions.

To me, um, there are things like the uh, the acquisition that you were just talking about, the Facebook purchase of Instagram for one billion dollars um and this is kind of this is a big deal for a number of reasons. It kind of struck me as funny, this this deal. We'll get into that a second. I want to finish my thought um and and but in this case, you have a situation where both companies are well known. Um. Instagram has a lot of buzz going on about it

right now. Plus you know everybody knows Facebook is UM. But then there are these other tech acquisitions where it's something like infrastructure. You know, some big company and it's a big company, but it's somebody who makes something that people don't rush out and buy off store shelves. UM gets acquired by somebody else who's sort of in the same vain. And you know, this is the kind of thing that investors talk about but is not common UM.

And that was one of those things that kind of struck me as I started doing research for this podcast. Is you've got the big names, and you go so and so acquired such and such, Oh my gosh, what is this gonna mean? And then you have somebody else who goes, wow, that was a billion dollar purchase. Okay, yeah, so um yeah, But the big news the week that we're recording this is the Facebook acquisition of Instagram for

one billion dollars, a princely sum to be sure. UM. And it's might actually be that might actually be a kingly sum at that point. UM. I got got promoted. Uh yeah, the uh And and for those who don't know, just so that we can get this uh all on the table. Instagram is a photo app used to be iOS exclusive and then opened up recently for Android. I have it on my Android phone. I as well have

it on my Android phone. And it is both an app that allows you to take photos and apply different filters to those photos so that you can make a good photo suddenly look really bad or uh, that's just me making some editorial comments. Well, no, I mean it's supposed to the idea is that you grunge it up so it looks appears as though we're taken on an older camera or maybe it's a former paper photo that's gotten stepped on and rubbed in the dirt. I mean

it's it's done on purpose. Yeah, it's it's it's kind of it's kind to be bad distressed if you will. But yeah, it does. It gives it gives things a neat little twist really um, and it's made a lot of iOS fans happy that they can it can do some some very simple filters, color filters on top of their photos that give it an appearance as if it's been edited, uh, you know, by someone who's fairly skilled in photo editing. But it's all you're doing is just

choosing a filter. It's really really simple, very easy interface and um uh. And it's also not just an app lets you take photos, but lets you share them as well. So it's got a social aspect to it where you can follow people on Instagram and then you can see as they up owd more photos, as they take more photos using Instagram, you can see them in a feed, So that way you can kind of keep up with what's going on in that person's life. And that is the key I think to this, to this acquisition. That's

why Facebook was interested in Instagram. Because Facebook is all about you know, social and photos as well, but it's mobile interface has not been widely regarded as being easy to use or good if we want to if we want to really boil it down. I mean, I personally don't have any problem with the Facebook mobile interface, but I know a lot of people who use Facebook even more extensively than I do, which is hard for me to imagine, but they find that it's just not as

robust as they would like. And part of that is the photo functions. Now I use a lot of other apps that will allow me to automatically push a photo to various social networks, including Twitter or Facebook. So for me it wasn't as big a deal. But for people who don't use that or don't have that option, Instagram gave them the ability to take a photo, put this filter on, share it with uh the social network, and now with Facebook's purchase, they're gonna be able to share

it with Facebook itself. Or maybe Facebook will just integrate Instagram's UH functionality into its own mobile apps. Well, from what I've read, the whole idea is to leave Instagram sort of on its own um, and Facebook actually has a reasonably good track record of doing that. I remember, um being a fan of friend feed when Facebook acquired that uh some time ago, and they said, um, oh, well,

we're pretty much gonna leave it alone. We just want to incorporate some of this technology into Facebook as well, and that we wanted to get these guys for their expertise and add some of this functionality Facebook and a lot of people on friend feed were going, well, this is the end, This is the end. And really they didn't mess with it uh um as much. But uh, but It is kind of funny because different companies have

different takes on it. Um. Jonathan and I first started talking about this podcast as being our take on Instagram, but I think it's kind of been um done in pretty much every tech channel. Why they were doing it and all these things and what happens if you don't like it. There are a lot of Facebook uh, people who don't like Facebook taking over Instagram because they, um, you know, they just said, well, they're gonna ruin it,

kind of like they didn't like the Facebook Spotify partnership. Yeah, yeah, um, And there have been lots of well, if you don't want to use Instagram anymore, here are some alternatives. I installed a couple of them, like stream Zoo and pixeler oh Matic and some of those, and they sort of do the same kinds of things. There are all sorts of alternatives if you don't want to use Instagram anymore.

But you know, I think I felt like this would be an opportunity to talk about some of these these acquisitions in the past, because um, they've all take different kinds of turns. Um. Some have been very hands off, some have been very hands on, some have succeeded, some have flopped miserably. Um, so we wanted to talk about some of the big ones and uh, and we've got

a whole bunch here. I wanna I wanna credit someone before we get too far into this, because a lot of the pretty much all the information I pulled I pulled from a spreadsheet that a Wired writer named Andy Bayou created. He created this amazing spreadsheet where he he just sort of uh trolled the Internet, not in the negative, you stink kind of way, but rather the right getting all the information you can for info about various big

tech acquisitions. And these are the ones that are really the kind that that get the notice of users because it's the recognizable brand names. But he pulled them all together, and he went so far as to even compare how much the reported acquisition amount was versus how many users the service that was acquired, how many users it had. Uh, he broke down what the cost per user was based on that information, and even how many employees the service had,

and what the cost per employee was. Because when you think about it, these acquisitions, some of them like Instagram that's a billion dollars, Instagram did not have a lot of employees. Uh, that thirteen employees according according to Andy's research, so thirteen employees and a billion bucks. He estimated that

that was about seventy seven million dollars per employee. Now that doesn't mean that each employee of Instagram is is taking home a cool seventy seven million, because the CEO and the head of Instagram are taking down about half a billion dollars together. So that's so about fifty of that purchase price went to the uh, the guys in charge of Instagram. But still you're thinking, that's like winning

the lottery. You know, you're working, you're working for this, you're working in a small, tight group, and you get acquired for a massive amount of money. That's kind of like that was the dream of the whole dot com bust too. There are a lot of companies that were starting up that we're trying to be really small and

nimble and get acquired by bigger companies. And some of the some of the stories we have, some of the um the acquisitions we can talk about happened before the dot com crash, including a couple from Yahoo that I wanted to talk about. So back in nineteen Yahoo made two really big acquisitions. The first was in January of

when Yahoo purchased geo Cities. Now, geo Cities was sort of a place where you could build your own web page and it was laid out like a city, like they had neighborhoods and everything, and and it was kind of a uh it was kind of like the place where people would build a website before there were really social networks. Yeah. Yeah, Now, UM, maybe some of you don't remember necessarily what what the World Wide Web was like. I was gonna say the Internet, but let's go stick

with the Worldwide Web. Um, back in in the mid to late nineties. Um, people didn't necessarily uh intend to go I mean, and the Internet was still sort of a new concept for people, and they wanted to know what can you do with this? I mean, emails a fairly reasonably easy concept to understand, um, and you know, there were others. There were more difficult things like using net for example, um, and then databases that weren't the

most intuitive. Yeah, as far as user interfaces are concerned. So, I mean, at the time, geo Cities was kind of a neat deal because it allowed people to create their own websites without having to learn how to code HTML. And there weren't a lot of tools, um, you know, things like a WordPress dot com or blogger or you know the journaling sites, which is I think sort of

what a lot of Geo cities pages were like. Or even wizzy Wig editors, yeah exact, which is grain Weaver or before that go live, so even even page mails stuff like that and Whizzywig. Just in case you don't know, is what you see is what you get where the edit that you're making on the screen, you what you're looking at on the screen, and your edit mode is you can be reasonably confident that's what's going to show up if you were to navigate there through a browser.

Back in the old days, we had to do everything by code. Yeah, well I should clarify too, because I was using some Whizzywig editors back in the late nineties.

But they for the most part, they were They came in two flavors, um fairly trustworthy, but very expensive, uh like like like a couple of hundreds of dollars or you could you could buy um, there were a couple of them that were you know, in the forty fifty dollar range, but they inserted junk code and the pages would break depending on what browser you were using or sometimes not depending on what browser you're using. Um, and they were just and you'd have to do this and

upload it to a server. Not everyone is comfortable with FTP and knowing how to do this, and Geo Cities was sort of a pioneer in this space. Hey, throw this content out there and make new friends in your neighborhood. Okay, So the acquisition went for reported about all three point five seven billion dollars. Three point five seven billion dollars people, that's that's three point five seven times more than the

Instagram acquisition. And those were in you know, that was about fifteen years rounding off earlier, So that was that was significant. So here's the problem is that Geo Cities that was probably right at the peak of geo City's popularity. Uh and then before too much longer, there was a shift in the way people use the web. Because before the dot com crash, a lot of the websites on the web were very static. So you would build a web page and it would pretty much stay that way

for months at a time. You wouldn't necessarily add new material because it was kind of a pain to do it, and really most people weren't thinking of the web in that sense. They were thinking of the web kind of like a book. You would go you would read a web page, and just like if you were to read a book, you wouldn't go back necessarily unless you just truly enjoyed the web page. But there wouldn't be any

new material there because it wasn't dynamic. But that began to change right around the same time that Yahoo made this purchase. And of course today Geo Cities no longer exists. So that's a three point five seven billion dollar purchase that eventually fizzled out. Now, it stayed around for a while. It's not like it it's not like it died immediately after y'all who purchased it, and y'ah who got more

community oriented as a result of it. Yeah, I wouldn't say that that it was a complete failure on Yahoo's part inasmuch as, um, the idea really of g O c d s really did propel things forward in the social space. Um. But yeah, in a way, you go, Okay, well, they spend a lot of money and then the service shutdown in that in that regard, you know, strictly on

that place. Then yeah, I know that whenever you look at at yeah Who as an analyst today, because Yahoo is a company that has has been struggling over the last couple of years. Um, and you start looking back on deals like this, it's very easy to point fingers. But it's even easier to point a finger at Yeah Whose. Other purchase in Broadcast dot Com, which was a an internet radio company. Broadcast dot Com was so back in

the nineties. Uh, there were there were a couple of people who were thinking about the possibility of broadcasting radio over the Internet, and I, you know, started looking into what they would need to do in order to do that, and eventually this company began m the company that would become Broadcast dot Com. And Uh, I had a fellow eventually leading it named Mark Cuban. I feel like I've

heard that name somewhere. Yeah, you might have anyway. Cuban he uh he was leading Broadcast dot Com, and yah Who approached to purchase the company for a amazing five point seven billion dollars. And when I say amazing, there are a couple of reasons for that. First of all,

that's that's a whole lot of money. But second of all, the uh, the company had about According to Andy, over at Wired had about five hundred and twenty thousand active users, so just over half a million active users five point seven billion dollars to essentially acquire those half million users. Keeping in mind that, you know, the idea was that these services would be rolled out into other parts of

Yahoo and become a bigger role. But um but still, if you were to break that down as Andy did, I like to call him Andy Uh, as Andy did for for the purposes of his article, he determined that that means that they spent almost eleven thousand dollars per user buying that that company. And um uh so that's you know, that's just it's crazy how how much money that is. I mean, it's for per user. Like you could have walked up to each person and said, if I give you ten grand, will you come to my

side every day? The person yes, And that might have been more effective because the broadcast dot com features they did get rolled out into some other Yahoo features. But most of that stuff no longer exists either, not as not as it did then. No, it got incorporated into other things. It's it's essentially lost now, like it's it's so buried in other other products that you can't even

recognize it anymore. And I think the Yahoo Broadcast acquisition by many is regarded as the biggest mistake and acquisitions ever. And that's up against some pretty stiff competition. Well, it did give the Dallas Mavericks another shot, since Mark Cuban bought them and has spent a lot of money on them, it's gotten quite good. But yeah, five point seven billion dollars for that company, and um uh, I should add that there's something else we need to talk about, just

very very briefly. I'm just I just want to address this. Some people may be thinking, hey, what about oh, well and Time Warner. That was that was that was often talked about the worst deal in tech ever. But we should point out that was a merger. That was not an acquisition. It was a merger and it was a it was sort of a tech non tech thing because you know, it merged if you will, the uh digital world with the um old media world O L D

E Media. Um Uh. But you know, if you if you think about it, though, they were yeah, who was at least thinking ahead, uh, the idea of streaming media, the idea of social websites. They were able to identify by these things, but they were you know, pre dot com bubble bursting, uh situations too, because this was the late nineties, which was right before the bubble burst. It's definitely frustrating in a way because you look at what Yah Who was doing and you think they were moving

in the right direction. It was just it was just slightly the wrong. It was bye bye by the end the number of like a year and a half if it had been a year and a half later after the dot com bubble had burst, And y'all who assuming that, Yeah Who had been able to weather the dot com bubble well enough. And I mean the company is still

around today. So even after making these massive deals, um, they might not have had to spend as much, and they might have might have been able to invest in similar products that would have been more attuned to the and I hate to use this buzzword web two point oh approach to the way the web works. Well, should we stick with Yahoo down? Sure we can talk a

little bit more. Yeah, they they've made some other purchases that actually did quite well for them, or at least are still very popular or like Flicker, Yes, that's you know the photo sharing and photo album uh database site, and Flicker I think is one of the more popular ones that's out there. Yeah. Um, although I did read in uh in my research that some people have been upset that Yeahoo didn't really do anything with Flicker, like they were expecting them to take it the next step

and Flicker sort of stayed the same red much. That's true, it hasn't changed much. And and as other social networks like Facebook and Google Plus have become more popular and even Twitter, a lot of that photos sharing and photo storage stuff has been offloaded onto those so sites like Flicker and also Google's Picasa, which never I don't think it was ever anywhere near as popular as Flicker was. Um, but Google's Picasa also have have sort of taken ahead.

I guess Google Picasa less so because that is what Google Plus uses as its foundation form for photos photo bucket one of the two. Yeah. Well, as a contrast, we're talking when yeah, who was spending billions of dollars for these acquisitions in two thousand five, And I would argue that Flicker in a way, it's probably way more popular than either of those two products, where that they

acquired for multibillions of dollars. Um Flicker was acquired for thirty million, but that's a big change, much more modest acquisition compared to the billions of dollars they spent just a few years earlier. And I think, yeah, I think that was much more wisely spent in that case. And the the acquisition the same year of Delicious for thirty million dollars, to which I think was done again with the best of intentions. Link sharing sites are still popular.

I think they were in ways for runners to Twitter, because they were supposed to be social link sharing sites. But I use mind more for Hey, I wanna save this because I'm gonna look at it later, let me say this, And I don't really want to share it with anybody because it's you know, I just want to remember to read it. Yeah. There there are a couple of these links sharing sites that are on these acquisitions that what we can talk about and and and a

lot of them have kind of faded a way. There's still there's still I think Reddit is really the only one that I habitually go to now. I don't I don't tend to use dig anymore, and I don't don't really use stumble Upon and I don't really use Delicious so well. Delicious was one of the early sites like this, and I think Yahoo had intended to make something big out of it, but they ended up, uh planning on shutting it down until people complained about that so much

that they found someone to uh to let it go to. Um. So another one of those things that just sort of, you know, pass right on through. So why don't we talk about some other Is there another company would like to move to from Yahoo? Or do you want to necessarily? How about we talked about eBay because eBay's also made some pretty big acquisitions in the past. One of them

was in two thousand two and eBay bought PayPal. Yeah, that was the most synergistic of all of these, if you'll pardon the corpse speak, right, Yeah, it's the one that fit the best into what eBay does. I mean PayPal. Obviously, if you want to have a service that allows you to set up an account to purchase things online, and you have a site that is all about selling things online, then there is clearly some uh some complementary overlap going

on there. And uh so eBay bought PayPal for about one point three billion dollars um, and uh, it sounds like a lot of of money. I mean, there's a lot of money. But there were over fifteen million users of of PayPal, so there was already a big established user base. There is much different from broadcast dot com. We only had the half million, so that purchase actually seemed like it was a pretty good idea, you know.

And there are plenty of people who still use PayPal now. Granted, PayPal over the last couple of years has had a couple of controversial news stories pop up, generally about There's been some about PayPal offering money, not offering money, but PayPal uh administering over payments to illegal sites or sites that are selling uh what pirated stuff or um uh that kind of thing. And then there's also uh, some other arguments about PayPal requiring people to go through some

pretty crazy steps in order to get money back. Like you've heard the story about the violin, right, So a guy purchased a violin, purchases an antique violin, and uh it is truly an antique violin for a couple of thousand dollars, as I recall, and then in is, for some reason or another unsatisfied with the purchase and wants the money back, but PayPal says that in order to get the money back, they have to have proof that

he destroyed the violin. He has to actually break it because PayPal doesn't want to refund money, and then have the guy just keep the violin anyway, and then he has the violin and the money. So the guy goes

and takes pictures of the destroyed antique violin. So something that a lot of people would argue has a lot of intrinsic value in it and should not have been destroyed was destroyed because of this, this procedure, this whole this policy that PayPal had, and uh so that's an example of some of the bad press PayPal has had in the past couple of years. But still it's again a very popular way of of processing transactions on online now.

eBay also made some other acquisitions over the last few years, and two thousand five, eBay purchase Skype, the VOIPE client voice over Internet Protocol client for two point six billion dollars. And this was one that had people scratching their heads, yeah, because the question was why would an online auction site purchase a voipe company? And there were there was some talk of possibly incorporating it into the auction uh uh.

The auction features itself so that potential buyers could speak with sellers while they were considering bidding on on objects, but that never really happened. And um also, eBay eventually started to move a little further away from the whole auction model and move more toward almost like an online retail center, so more like Amazon than it used to be. I mean, they still do the auctions as well, but

that's not necessarily their primary focus anymore. So Skype uh seemed like it might have been a good idea to eBay or really on. But I think a lot of people now think of the eBay purchase of Skype as one of the big mistakes in tech acquisitions. And eventually eBay sold Skype off. Now, first they just sold off the controlling interest to a group of investors and then eventually divested themselves of pretty much all of their interest in Skype to a little company that you might have

heard of. It started off in a garage. It's called um oh, they like conquistadores Microsoft. That's it, alright. So yeah, just just to provide some context, um, when eBay acquired Skype in two thousand five. It's spent two point six billion dollars. But when when um, Microsoft bought it in uh, skypes value had increased. Microsoft was willing to pay eight point five billion dollars. eBay did well with that auction, Yes it did, I think. I think actually Microsoft sniped

the that that at the very last second. Yes they are, I would say, as a power seller, we gotta think about it. I mean, Skype is a very popular voice over Internet Protocol UH service, right, and and that's a very valuable asset to have, and Microsoft had to be worried about other companies possibly jumping in there. I can think of two right off the top of my head that would have been very interested in Skype. Facebook is one and Google is the other. Yeah, yeah, definitely so

um and possibly somebody else named after a fruit. Um commodore is not named. Uh. There was one other acquisition the eb eBay made, and this kind of ties into what we were talking about with Delicious and Yahoo earlier, which was stumble Upon, another discovery site, and they bought it for a seventy five million dollars and um, yeah that's another one that kind of I mean, it still exists. Yeah, they haven't. I don't. I wouldn't say they've necessarily mismanaged

it or anything, but it hasn't. It's sort of neither taken off nor bombed. It's just sort of still there. Yeah. You know, there's sometimes where you you encounter multiple companies trying to compete in the same space, and you might have one or two front runners and then everyone else is just kind of there. And this is one of

those cases. So where where we want to go from here? Well, you know, it's funny because as we've been talking, you know, we had quite a list of these, um, some that I collected and some that you collected, and um, these are all kind of juicy. So we can you know, talk about should we talk about the pound Gorilla? Sure? Um being Google? Yes? Um, I was like, yes, Google has a pretty good track record of well there, there's some companies that are more a quiz ative than others.

Let's say that acquisitive acquisitive. Um, yeah, I got to use that degree in English for something. Um. Yeah, so uh you know they've they've they pick up more than I would say just about any other tech company. Um, and uh, you know they're there, they tend to be more uh, let's say, flamboyant purchases, like, for example, Blogger back in two thousand three, which they picked up for twenty million dollars UM. This was that was a good time.

This was an example of a good purchase at a good time, because that was right as the blog thing began to take off among I would say the masses, when it became kind of a phenomenon, Do do? Do do do? I would have if he hadn't um and you know, they added they continue to add other Google is good at picking out services that complement existing services and and and companies they think that will fit well within their portfolio, like picasa um in two thousand four, which they acquired

for five million UM. You know, Dodgeball in two thousand five was also on Mr Bo's list. I don't know him well enough to call him Andy, so yeah, Dodgeball, Dodgeball and another service, Jaiku, which they purchased in two thousand seven for twelve million. These are these are good ones to point out because these are failures really for Google. I as I don't know that if I don't know how Google portrays them, right, but I know that you know from the outside, they look like failures because you've

got Dodgeball, which the location is sharing. It was a location sharing application company. And in fact, the people who were behind Dodgeball eventually left Google and found it a different company called four Square. Wait, don't you play that with it? No, it's different kind of four Square, not

the game but the the check in service. So Dodgeball never really went anywhere, and in fact, the people behind Dodgeball were very frustrated by which is why they went on eventually to to found four Square, because that was probably something closer to what they had imagined when they started Dodgeball than what it turned out to be. Jaiku is a short messaging service kind of sharing a model, sort of like oh there's another company that does this. Um,

oh that's right Twitter. Yeah, so Jaiku was Google's well, Jaiku was Jaiku's answer to Twitter, but Google purchased Jaiku and then or Haiku if you prefer. But that never really went anywhere either. It had it had its you know, dedicated users who loved it, but it never really grew like Twitter did. Twitter exploded and jaik who sat there? And so that, um, Jaiku's no more? Right? Yeah, I went the other day actually before we discussed this, and

it's it is gone. But perhaps perhaps one of Google's most famous, perhaps the most famous acquisition and Google has made besides a Motorola mobility, which were not really covering in this, uh, is YouTube two thousand six one point six five billion dollars. Yeah, and that's a that's a lot of clams. But then YouTube had YouTube had a lot of users, like over over thirty four million active users when at the time of the purchase, and it was you know, Google was looking ahead saying in a way,

YouTube is also kind of a search engine. Yes, it is. People go onto YouTube and they they will they might you know, browse around, but often you go in and you PLoP your cursor in the search bar and you type in some stuff and you hope that the videos that come up and pertain to what you were typing in and so, um, it made sense in that in that respect. And uh, in fact, eventually, you know, Google had its own Google Video service for a while and then they eventually got rid of that, and so YouTube

is just the whole Google Video thing now. But it's uh that that's one that was very controversial for a while because while the one point six five billion dollars wasn't the largest amount of money spent on a tech company, and it wasn't that they didn't have a lot of users. There was another problem, which was just that YouTube really wasn't making a whole lot of money. Like it's hard to make money when you're dealing with a service that's

that's that big. Well, YouTube has another thing that's uh playing against it and making money, which is um that it requires I was gonna say boatloads, let's go with maybe shiploads of bandwidth and and not only that but servers. Yeah, a lot of a lot of physical machines are required to keep YouTube going. And video video is resource intensive. Um, it takes it uses a lot of data, and especially now that they've got h D High definition video takes

up even more space. So you've got lots of hardware, using lots of electricity and lots of bandwidth. And somebody's got to pay for that if you're going to keep this stuff up, and if you if the users aren't

paying for it, then the company is. And uh, you know, I I a startup may not have been able to handle paying for it at the way that YouTube has grown, but Google can and they can sell ads alongside it, yeah, and which they do, and yeah, it's it's you know, we talked about in our YouTube podcast, we talked about how uh these the company ends up seeing something like forty eight hours of material uploaded every minute on YouTube.

It's probably even more than that by now. Ah So when you're talking about that level of of uploads and you know that quantity that's coming in, you need to have a nice, big company behind you to make sure that there's a foundation, a solid foundation there. And uh, you know, YouTube is definitely one of those things that have has just become increasingly popular over the years. So you could say that it's a great acqu position in the sense that if it were to go away, that

would be bad. But it's probably still one of the ones that that vexes Google the most in that balancing

the revenue issues versus the maintenance and overhead issues. Plus they're all the lawsuits that are related to YouTube that have to do with intellectual property theft, where you've got all these companies that are accusing Google and YouTube of harboring pirates and allowing people to upload pirate ID or or at least uh unlicensed copies of content to YouTube, and uh so we've been seeing a lot of that in the news recently too, about the the stories about

the court cases involving whether or not YouTube knowingly harbored material that violated intellectual property rights, or if if the company was acting in the best interests of both its users and intellectual property rights owners. I requiring people to take down videos or taking down the videos for them that violated those policies, there's it's a big mess right now. Yeah, yeah, okay, So I wanted to talk about the the uh, some of the acquisitions that we don't necessarily think about as

being exciting. One of those is, uh, what happened just last year when we're recording this, Uh, Texas Instruments bought National Semiconductor. That fails to excite me. Yeah, exactly. This is not the kind of thing that, um, you know, if if Apple bought Facebook. I mean, I'm just saying, like, two big names that lots of people are interested in. People love and hate both of these companies, Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor. That's that's big news. That's a big deal.

Six point five billion dollars. That's a lot of money. But it doesn't make the same kinds of headlines as too popular. Uh, you know companies that make the news every day and people will spend money on, and it lacks that emotional investment that comes from these other deals that are not as big when you look at it from a monetary standpoint, but they seem to be bigger because they are impacting stuff that we interact with on a daily basis. Yeah. Then there was two thousand nine

when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems number seven point four billion. Um, that was that was huge news for anyone who knew what was going on. Yeah, like there were engineers who were freaking out. Yeah, absolutely absolutely. Well, Uh that that calls into question a lot of other stuff too. Um. Larry Ellison, head of Oracle, is another one of those. He's a character. That's a really nice way to put it. We're gonna have to do an episode on Larry Ellison, and I think half of it will be bleeped out

and those will just be the quotes. Yeah exactly. Um, he's yeah, he's he's definitely a character. And a lot of people who are fans of Sun, the traditional Sun Microsystems company, we're very upset that Oracle was was buying for a number of reasons, but there was a lot of technology behind that to some of it open source UM that they were really afraid that Oracle was going to to do away with UM. I remember Hewlett Packard buying Compact in two thousand one for twenty three point

five billion dollars. I was a little I was a little stunned by that one. And then we got stunned again when when HP talked about spinning off it's uh, it's PC business. Well then, of course, you know, Hewlett Packard bought three Com for two point seven billion back in two thousand nine, which ended up being a big mech UM and it didn't really it wasn't a thing for a lot of people. UM, you know, UM trying to look for something else that people might have been

interested in, and I do have. When j D s Unifhase bought SDL in two thousand four, almost forty one billion, that's a big chunk of change. But again, and it's a huge tech acquisition, but it's not the kind of thing that for a lot of us, those of us who listen to this tech podcast, UM, you know, are more interested in sort of the uh tech end people thing, and yeah, it affects a lot of people, but it's

on the back end of things. Yeah yeah, And so a lot of us are going, well, okay, yeah, that's interesting. That's a lot of money, but how does that affect me? And for a lot of us, it's it's not something

that that we notice or touch on a daily basis. Yeah, So I did wanna we'll close this out really quickly here and I didn't wanna say that, Um, we have to talk about news Core in MySpace, because this is another one of those, uh, those moves that at the time seemed like it made sense, but as it played out, it just did not work. And that was that. News Core is the parent company of Fox News, among other companies, and uh. News Core purchased MySpace in two thousand five

for five eight million dollars. Now, at the time my Space was that seemed like a steel. It was incredibly popular. It was the online social network, and it was the place where you would go if you wanted your eyes to bleed and listen to terrible music, because that's what

everyone seemed to do with their profiles. But that was user behavior, not the fault of the service itself, and then Facebook came around, and most people, I think at the time, maybe not most people, but a lot of people at the time bet on my Space beating out Facebook because it had a headstart. Facebook was was only open to college students when it first started, and it just you know, it seemed like it was it's it didn't seem as feature rich as my Space did. So

how could my Space lose to Facebook? Very effectively? Is the way that turned out. So news Corps sold my Space off uh Inn for thirty five million dollars to Specific Media, which was a group of investors. So from five million when they purchased it to thirty five million when they sold it, that's not a success story. And you know, news Coore did try a couple of times

to revitalize my Space. You know, they tried to make it more of a music discovery kind of social network, but by then I think it was too late because my Space was one of those places where bands, a lot of bands had made their web presence known. They used them because I had great tools. If you were a band and you wanted to share some of your music and build up a fan base, it was a good resource. But there are other resources online now that do that just as well or better in some cases.

And uh, it just was too little, too late, and so news Corpse sold it off for million, eating that loss. And uh and we'll see what specific media does with it, if anything, or if they just end up cannibalizing it and turning it into something else. Honestly, we don't know right now. And uh, just one last little note how

stuff works dot com. We were I heard that we were acquired several years ago by Discovery Communications, So you know, we were part of another company for a while and we're acquired back shortly after I joined UM, within a year that I joined, I think, or maybe a year and a half, UM two months for me. Yeah, so we we ended up getting acquired by Discovery Communications and now we are part of that company. So uh yeah,

it's UM. And it was interesting. You know, it was a it was a different culture, but it was very complimentary to what we already had. So I think as far as transitions go, ours was probably one of the smoothest I've ever seen. I've seen other companies where, you know, they get acquired by another one and one culture ends up dominating over the other. And it can be messy. Yeah. Well, reading a lot of the transcriptions of these um these acquisitions too, you can tell that some of them were

like oil and water and others were less. Yes, some of them went together, like like wine and cheese, because I always wine and never have each cheese. And on that note, we're going to wrap this up. If you guys have any topics you would like us to tackle in future podcasts, like how bloopers work, so you can you can write in, you can send in a note to our email address that's tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or let us know on Facebook or Twitter are handled.

There is tech stuff hs W and Chris and I will talk to you again or really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how staff works dot com? Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you