The new year has just begun and if 2008 is anything like 2007, we should expect a bunch of acquisitions in the tech world. As I heard someone say recently, acquisitions should be considered the lottery for geeks, except the odds of "winning" are much higher than the actual lottery.
May of 2007 was about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Facebook. Apple's Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates made a rare appearance stage as part of the D Conference. Their chat with Walt Mosberg and Kara Swisher was interesting to say the least, and the conversation included the mentioning of those Mac vs. PC commercials where Jobs said that the point of them was for Mac and PC's to like each other.
We know that Google likes to get their hand in just about everything and anything which is why they make so many acquisitions. Google's acquisition choice today is Jaiku, the fairly new service that competes with Twitter.
If you visit Google today, you'll notice the usual logo has been replaced with the one you see pictured to the right. It's Google's 9th Birthday, and they're celebrating! While there are actually several dates that could be considered Google's birthday, clearly they acknowledge today, September 27th as their official birthday, the day that they became incorporated and their name was officially Google inc.
All along I had been wondering why Yahoo hadn't acquired Zoho (Online Office Suite) yet. In fact, back in July I asked this very question and I suggested that Yahoo seemed like a likely buyer because Microsoft has no need for them, and Google has their own Office Suite. Now I know that Yahoo had no need for Zoho - they were going after Zimbra, an Online Open Source Office Suite.
Acer, the Taiwan based computer company, has announced that they are buying Gateway! The acquisition of Gateway for $710 million will make Acer the 3rd largest PC company in the World, overtaking China’s Lenovo.
Sourcefire announced today that they acquired the open source antivirus application called ClamAV. This news conveniently comes just one week after ClamAV was ranked one of the best antivirus applications for the Linux operating system. It even beat out almost all of the commercial solutions that were available.
Remember back in April when Google announced that they were acquiring DoubleClick, and Microsoft said “not so fast” and protested the move saying it would hurt competition? Then what did Microsoft do? They acquired online advertising firm aQuantitive, and more recently, they announced they were acquiring an advertising exchange firm called AdECN as well.
Google had Google Apps (among other things) in mind when they went after Postini to acquire them. The acquisition for Postini, a communications security and compliance company was announced today for $625 million.
Back in May, a screenshot from an Adobe Breeze presentation yielded an interesting Google Talk screenshot which included new links like “show dial-pad,” “call details,” and “close.” This gave us great indication that Google has plans of incorporating a calling feature where users would be able to dial-out and place phone calls right from Google Talk.
