Apple buys a company every three to four weeks | Hacker News Reader

Apple buys a company every three to four weeks

bbc.co.uk

32 pointsdan123413 comments

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Apple buys more than that* but most of them are too small to warrant any notice.

*: Source - Apple bought my small company 16 years ago.

I would love to hear more about it (if it's legal got you to talk about it).

Did you stay at Apple after the acquisition?

> Apple has acquired about 100 companies over the last six years, the company’s chief executive Tim Cook has revealed.

You don't think his data sources have recorded that information?

I think he doesn't care about the majority of companies that Apple buy. The sort that don't need approval above VP, because that's within their discretion.

I know of several companies that Apple bought that never appeared on any list, and I know several people who arrived by acquisition. On the basis of what I know, there are significantly more than 100 companies bought over a 6-year period. They're just too small to matter - like mine.

Is there a list of companies Apple (and/or other giants) has bought? Maybe even shown on a timeline?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

The list of the last companies from 2019 and 2020. Makes me think they are playing catch up in the A.I. space. They know thats the next big service.

They hired John Giannadrea who was responsible for Google's big push into machine learning (e.g. he bought Deep Mind) and put him in charge of it all so I think they are taking things seriously. I don't know that I would characterize it as "catch up" though.

The pace and structure of startup acquisitions by FB, Apple, and Google these days reminds me of Cisco in the 90's (the Mike Volpi era).

Considering how big Apple is, and how diverse its offerings are, that doesn't sound like a lot.

Still. Just think about how much effort has to go into each of those transactions. It’s mind blowing from that angle. Acquisitions can take months individually.

I've been on both sides. You can think of the main people involved as:

- internal executive sponsor (for a company the size of Apple there are probably 100 people who might be able to sponsor an acquisition and shepard it through, it's definitely at least 10). So this means for the sponsor it's more likely 1 a year or less. While Tim Cook is almost certainly involved in some way in each transaction, it is likely limited to a couple of hours.

- corporate development people, who help source deals and strategize, more scalable and are capable of working on multiple deals at once

- lawyers, who are easy to scale

So it's not in my opinion too hard, particularly for the small acquisitions Apple makes. It's the big acquisitions that are real organizational time sucks, because there you are limited by the CEO. Apple hasn't done one of those since NEXT.

I love that Apple is big enough that a $3B cash acquisition (and it's biggest ever) is barely a footnote in the company's history.

It would be interesting to know what processes they go through for each acquisition. After so many they must have optimised it. My guess is it isn't like Microsoft buying Nokia.

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