TechStuff Classic: Tech’s Biggest Acquisition Stories

called Texts Biggest Acquisition Stories. This has been a big part of a lot of Tech Stuff episodes, the idea of companies acquiring other companies and how that changed the fate of both parties involved. In some cases, those companies go on to do great things and in other cases things fall apart, sometimes because the acquiring company has overextended itself. But this is one of the the episodes where I talk about and Chris, my co host, also talks about

some of the biggest acquisition stories in tech history. So enjoy 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 just 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 is 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 that'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, well, that was a

billion dollar purchase. Okay, 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 got a lot might actually might actually be a kingly sum at that point, um got got promoted. 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 it 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 dirty. I mean it's it's done on purpose. Yeah, it's it's it's kind of it's kind of good 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 upload 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 in 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 going to 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 whatever, 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 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 out, well, this is the end. This is the end. And really they

didn't mess with it 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 is 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 on 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 going to 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 taken 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. Yeah, and uh, and we've

got a whole bunch here. I wanna I want to 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 he created this amazing spreadsheet where he he just sort of uh trolled the Internet, not the negative you stink kind of way, but rather the grabbing 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

seventies 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 of that purchase price went to the guys in charge of Instagram. But still you're thinking,

that's like winning the lottery. You know, you're working and you're working for this, You're working in a small type 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.

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 ninete, Yahoo made two really big acquisitions. The first was in

January of n when Yahoo purchased geo Cities. Yeah. 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, email is a fairly reasonably easy concept to understand, um, and you know there were others. There were more difficult things like us 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 Whizzywig editors. Yeah, exactly as drain 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, 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 like in the old days, we had to do everything by code. Yeah, well I should clarify too, because I was using some

whizzy wig 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 them. There were a couple of them that were, you know, in the forty to 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 City is was sort of a pioneer in this space. You know, hey, throw this content up there and make new friends in your neighborhood. Okay, So the acquisition went for reported about 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, and 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 in as much as um the idea really of geo cd 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 Yeah Who as an analyst today, because y'ah who 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 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 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 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 theme but he had about according to Andy over at, Wired had about five 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 out 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. But as 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 it's spent a lot of money on them. It's gotten quite good. But yeah, five point seven billion dollars for that company. And 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 some people may be thinking, Hey, what about a Well and Time Warner that was that was that was often talked about the worst deal in heck 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 digital world with the um old media world l d E

or 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 these things, but they were you know, pre dot com bubble bursting uh situations too because this was the late you know, nineties, which was right before the bubble burst. It's definitely frustrating in a way because you look at what yeah, 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 ya who? Then? 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, 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. Um, although I did read in UH in my research that some people have been upset that Yahoo didn't really do anything with Flicker, like they were expecting them to take it the next step and Flick or sort of stayed the same as it really innovated much.

That's true, it hasn't changed much and launch, 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 for UM for photos photo Bucket one of the two. Yeah. Well, as a contrast, we're talking when Yahoo 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 it was 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 save 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 are a couple of these links sharing sites that are on these acquisitions at what we can talk about and and and a lot

of them have kind of faded away. 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. Yeah, 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, passed right on through. Chris and I have more to say about tech's biggest acquisition stories, but first

let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. 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. 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 where I only had the half million, so that that purchase actually seemed like it was a pretty good idea, you know, and are 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 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 purchased Skype, the voipe client voice over Internet procol 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 void company? And there were there were 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 towards 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 early 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 up 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 Conkiston wores 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, Skypes value had increased. Microsoft was willing to pay eight point five billion dollars. That's a 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 eBay 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 at 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 multi bole 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 uh, 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 h well there there's some companies that are more acquisitive 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, yes, when it became kind of a phenomenon. Do do do 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 Bao's list. I don't know him well enough to call him Andy. So yeah, Dodgeball done five million. Dodgeball and another service, Jaike, 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 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 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 that the people behind Dodgeball were very frustrated by this, 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 uh, 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 Jaiku 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. Hey guys, it's Jonathan from the future, and I just want to tell you. Sorry, I I'll have to tell you later. I'm getting acquired. Let's take a quick break. Perhaps the most famous acquisition Google has made, besides a Motorola mobility, which we're 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're 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 event'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 and 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 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. Uh 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 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 acquisition in the sense that if it

were to go away, that would be bad. But uh, it's probably still one of the ones that that vexus 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 by 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 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 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 them for a number of reasons. But there was a lot of technology behind that too, 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 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 listened 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 indirectly. 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 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 as it played out, it just did not work. And that was that Newscore 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 seems 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 less into 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 in for thirty five million dollars to Specific Media, which is 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 Score did try a couple of times to vitalize 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 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. And that wraps up another classic episode of

tech Stuff. The acquisition deal that was about to happen to me before that last commercial break kind of fell through at the last minute. It's a bummer. I was totally ready to get an Apple tattoo, but looks like I'm just gonna have to hold off for now. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,

send me an email. The address is tech Stuff at house stupp Works dot com, or draw me a line over on social media on Facebook and Twitter, it is text Stuff H s W. Pop on over to our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You'll find links to all the old episodes there as well, and hey, check out our merchandise store. It's over at t public dot com slash tech stuff. There's also a link from

our website. Every purchase you make over on that site goes to help our show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again and really soon. Tech Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.