<story><title>Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard</title><url>https://news.microsoft.com/2022/01/18/microsoft-to-acquire-activision-blizzard-to-bring-the-joy-and-community-of-gaming-to-everyone-across-every-device/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mathattack</author><text>People may be flooding into vertical integration, though the history of that isn’t great.  (Look at AOL&amp;#x2F;TimeWarner or Verizon&amp;#x2F;AOL&amp;#x2F;Tumblr&amp;#x2F;Yahoo)&lt;p&gt;All it takes is missing one generation and the house of cards gets written down.  Someone can create the next generation blockbuster for a lot less than $69bln.&lt;p&gt;To argue against myself, they’ve become a lot better at picking trends since Balmer left too.</text></item><item><author>curiousllama</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s wild how Microsoft has been able to vertically integrate gaming.&lt;p&gt;They now own the distribution (Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass), the games (Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft + what they owned before), the OS (Windows, Xbox), the hardware (Xbox, many PCs), and the back end compute (Azure). The only thing they&amp;#x27;re missing, the network bandwidth, is mostly a commodity anyway.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a heck of a moat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mdasen</author><text>AOL&amp;#x2F;TimeWarner was a failure because because it valued AOL at $200B and TimeWarner at $164B. AOL was just way over-valued. It wasn&amp;#x27;t really an integration failure so much as paying too much for something. If Time Warner had bought AOL for $2B, it would have been fine. The problem is that they merged valuing AOL at 100x that when it wasn&amp;#x27;t worth it and later sold for $4.4B to Verizon.&lt;p&gt;Likewise, Yahoo&amp;#x2F;Verizon bought a lot of properties at inflated values. Tumblr wasn&amp;#x27;t worth $1.1B, but Yahoo wanted to buy one of the hot up-and-coming properties to feel relevant.&lt;p&gt;I think the big issue is the price one is paying and whether one has a plan for the purchase or if the purchase is more &amp;quot;but if I don&amp;#x27;t make a big move, what am I doing? I can&amp;#x27;t go wrong following trends, right?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;For example, AOL&amp;#x2F;TimeWarner was a situation of over-paying because TimeWarner was afraid that the internet was going to eat the world and they needed to stay relevant. AOL was so hot and it&amp;#x27;s easy to get swept up in the moment thinking &amp;quot;I need to get on board now or I&amp;#x27;ll miss it!&amp;quot; Likewise, Yahoo feared becoming irrelevant as Google took over the internet and thought buying Tumblr would make them the hip forward company once again.&lt;p&gt;Activision Blizard seems like a reasonable add-on for Microsoft. $69B isn&amp;#x27;t that much money for it given it would represent a P&amp;#x2F;E ratio of around 26. Apple&amp;#x27;s P&amp;#x2F;E is 30, Amazon 62, Microsoft 34, Google 26. So they aren&amp;#x27;t paying an absurd amount given Activision&amp;#x27;s profits. Even if they did no integration or strategy, Activision could simply continue doing its thing and contribute favorably to Microsoft&amp;#x27;s bottom line.&lt;p&gt;With a tiny bit of strategy, it seems clear Microsoft could get even more value out of the company. Maybe a few Xbox exclusive titles to push their console business. Maybe some stuff for their game streaming service.&lt;p&gt;If Disney has shown us something over the past few years, it&amp;#x27;s that owning IP that people like allows you to keep spinning new versions of that IP. Activision has lots of that kind of IP in the gaming space so Microsoft should be able to use that to its advantage.&lt;p&gt;I think there&amp;#x27;s a big difference between buying Activision at a price whose P&amp;#x2F;E ratio is better than your own and where there are clear strategies that could offer you even more value compared with the &amp;quot;omg, I&amp;#x27;m getting left behind! I&amp;#x27;ll pay anything you want&amp;quot; panic purchases&amp;#x2F;mergers of other companies.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard</title><url>https://news.microsoft.com/2022/01/18/microsoft-to-acquire-activision-blizzard-to-bring-the-joy-and-community-of-gaming-to-everyone-across-every-device/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mathattack</author><text>People may be flooding into vertical integration, though the history of that isn’t great.  (Look at AOL&amp;#x2F;TimeWarner or Verizon&amp;#x2F;AOL&amp;#x2F;Tumblr&amp;#x2F;Yahoo)&lt;p&gt;All it takes is missing one generation and the house of cards gets written down.  Someone can create the next generation blockbuster for a lot less than $69bln.&lt;p&gt;To argue against myself, they’ve become a lot better at picking trends since Balmer left too.</text></item><item><author>curiousllama</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s wild how Microsoft has been able to vertically integrate gaming.&lt;p&gt;They now own the distribution (Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass), the games (Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft + what they owned before), the OS (Windows, Xbox), the hardware (Xbox, many PCs), and the back end compute (Azure). The only thing they&amp;#x27;re missing, the network bandwidth, is mostly a commodity anyway.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a heck of a moat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bravetraveler</author><text>Intel has also been feeling the pain of vertical integration.  Like with most things, double edged sword.&lt;p&gt;They fabricated their chips - not sure if they still do.  Initially this was great, they owned the equipment and got things &amp;#x27;at cost&amp;#x27;.  However, they had trouble refining their tooling to get &amp;lt; 14nm for several generations.&lt;p&gt;This made them less competitive for a while, while having a pile of expenses a more lean design house wouldn&amp;#x27;t have.  They&amp;#x27;ll surely be fine, but it&amp;#x27;s not the same sprint they&amp;#x27;ve had for quite a while.</text></comment>