Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
I think a lot of big acquisitions make &quot;sense,&quot; given the current market.<p>The most successful companies have lots of cash, high share prices, and amazing cash cows. They <i>could</i> borrow for (almost) free, so resources are practically unlimited.  Their R&amp;D is already well funded. Most of their big, growth oriented endeavours are not cash-constrained. There are usually no factories to build or production to scale up.<p>Google tried &quot;20% time.&quot; They tried &quot;let many flowers grow.&quot; Those things seemed ambitious at 2007-scale. In 2021 terms... new flowers need to be S&amp;P 500 companies to represent growth, instead of just clutter. &quot;Meaningful growth,&quot; for Alphabet, is a big number.<p>How else does a MSFT, Google or (especially) FB put $20bn to work? Acquiring &quot;just works.&quot;<p>Of course, there are in-house alternatives. Waymo is an in-house investment by Alphabet that&#x27;s bigger than this Nuance acquisition... especially if you consider the $bns Waymo will continue to need until some unknown future date. Self driving is looking more hopeful (certainly to investors) than it was when waymo started.... but waymo is still a dubious investment.<p>Consider that Google could have bought any car company, for about as much as waymo will cost eventually. Car companies have loans, so you could quibble the math... but details.<p>Acquiring is easy. The path of least resistance wins &gt;50% of the time. We have that dynamic here, both in the human&#x2F;managers sense and in the arbitrage-like incentives in the market currently.