Companies adding competitors or other companies to their assets is nothing new but the amount of acquisitions that took place in 2011, indicates it was a busy year. As I mentioned in the mobile year in review, patents played a huge role in certain acquisitions.
The acquisition that made the opposition squirm the most must be Siri. Siri is the software that provides something similar to artificial intelligence on the iPhone 4S. The value added by the company whom Apple acquired in 2010 firmly highlights the notion “Quality not Quantity”. It will be interesting to see in 2012 if Tim Cook and the Apple team buy companies.
The Googorola deal came as unexpectedly as any tech acquisition of the past year. Larry Page has changed how Google operates in terms of acquisitions. One word: Aggressive.
The deal that surprised me the most this past year has to be HP buying Autonomy. A hardware focused business such as HP generally tries to stay away from purchasing software companies. The decision proved to be the last one made by Leo Apotheker while being HP CEO.
HP announced earlier this week that they will be making WebOS open source software instead of closing it down. HP had a lot of drama in 2011 and their WebOS software disaster highlighted how they have lost their ways.
The console gaming industry was severely disrupted by social media games in 2011. Zynga through their Farmville games (social media based gaming) ensured that Electronic Arts had to acquire Popcap to have an entry in that space. Traditional console gaming is under fire from games based on iDevices and also gaming seen on social media.
The battle between NVIDIA and ATI (which will be rebranding to AMD in 2012) led to NVIDIA buying Icera. NVIDIA, traditionally a graphics card manufacturer, have been using their CPU’s for mobile devices and Icera was therefore) purchased to augment NVIDIA’s mobile CPU efforts.
Cisco closed a 2010 acquisition in April. The flip camera company whom Cisco spent a lot of money on was closed very unexpectedly.
As most industries in electronics and technology become more competitive, expect to see more acquisitions as behemoths like Oracle, HP and Dell try to stay relevant. I believe that due to the economic conditions currently seen, we are in a period of consolidation. The companies that have large stashes of cash (Microsoft, Apple) will be on the lookout in 2012 to buy distressed assets or acquire competitors…
