It's amazing how quickly Sculley reminded me why he had no business running Apple.<p>"He said it could shift the 'whole landscape of e-commerce' if it bought, for example, eBay."<p>Why not just buy Amazon? Or the moon? It's really big too.<p>"... when you look at the Passbook, and fingerprint recognition - what would it mean if Apple went out and bought eBay? And they had PayPal, and integrated that? My guess is you'd suddenly see the whole landscape of e-commerce shift."<p>It'd shift alright. The efforts toward fingerprint theft and black market print trading would skyrocket, because there would suddenly be a direct financial link to millions of fingerprints. You can change your Visa card, you can change your address, you can change your phone #, you can change your social security #, you can change your name, you can change your password, you can change your PIN #, you can't change your finger prints.
Given Sculley's time and "success" at Apple, the data suggests that doing exactly the opposite of what he proposes would be in Apple's best interests.
<i>"Here's a man who has spent 33 years at Microsoft, loves the company," he said. "He really did not get enough credit for what he did accomplish.<p>"I can't name a CEO who didn't make some mistakes in the hi-tech industry.<p>"I think Ballmer has a lot he ought to be proud of. So he didn't get everything right - not many people do."</i><p>Ummm.... Is he suggesting lets celebrate someone who spent a lot of money buying companies that didn't pan out? And better yet, let's suggest the company that destroyed them in the market to switch and follow their vanquished foe's failed strategy?<p>No wonder he destroyed so much value at Apple!
This touches on the issue of why companies have amassed such huge reserves and seem unwilling or unable to spend them. Clayton Christensen (of Innovators Dilemma fame) gave an interesting talk at the RSA last month[1] where he described a possible reason for this. Unfortunately only the audio is up but they do often have video so perhaps that'll be there soon as the slides were very important.<p>The high-level summary is that in order for companies to develop market-creating changes, they need to be willing to make long-term investments with high probabilities of failure. This hasn't happened because the incentives of the management of the company are to provide short-term results which means they choose to only deliver incremental improvements or cost-savings as it has a greater improvement in the short-term on share prices and their remuneration.<p>He went into far more detail - listen if this sounds interesting to you.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2013/the-capitalists-dilemma" rel="nofollow">http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2013/the-...</a>
Has any big acquisition ever made for a positive integration?<p>And if Apple wanted to dip into payments, a mobile payment processor is far more compatible with their existing offerings and more Apple-y to boot.<p>Square would be the obvious choice, not Paypal.
The worst thing a big company can do is buy another big company. The two will never mesh well - one will be subsumed into the other. It is very, very rare that big acquisitions and mergers work out well. One company is sure to wither on the vine.<p>If you don't believe me, go ask someone who worked at an EMC company who was part of an acquisition.
eBay is an obvious nonsense, there's no link up there that makes sense.<p>The only largish company that springs to mind that might makes sense is one Apple tried to buy previously and failed - Dropbox. Apple have a weakness in their cloud service offerings that Dropbox might help fill but given what it would likely cost ($5bn+) and how Apple have slowly been improving in this area, I suspect that Apple would be as well just sinking that money into what they're already doing.
Instead of buying a company like eBay, Apple should try to acquire a company like Tesla, assuming Elon is ever willing to sell (probably not).<p>1. Apple has considered building a car before<p>2. Not quite the same but essentially an EV is pretty much a giant computer, and more relevant to Apple's current strength than entering the e-commerce space itself. There is a lot of baggage that comes with the eBay/PayPal business model (I realize this is just an example Scully used) that Apple probably doesn't want even if they were to enter the payment space.<p>3. The market for EVs is still tremendously young and in my opinion hugely massive and one worth entering and competing in right now even if it is far from Apple's current product lineup and doesn't sync as well as all of its existing product.<p>4. Even with point #3 above, Apple is working with car manufacturers already to integrate Siri and other things probably. This might put a dent in partnerships (maybe) but arguably the EV market is more important than extending a marketing strategy to integrate Siri and other aspects into other major car brands in my opinion.<p>Just my two cents.
Building great products is hard. Take something hard and try to scale it, you get shit. You have to make it easy first, reduce it to a formula that you can then abstract and export to other domains. Apple has not achieved that. They can't buy up big companies and expect them to suddenly start getting the same results Apple gets. This is pie-in-the-sky nonsense.
only works if you immediately fire all top and middle line manages in the aquired company, lest you import a hostile culture and a lot of foreign politics.<p>HP buying EDS, Atos buying SBS - if you ever talk to employees on the inside you'll hear about what a big aquisition means.<p>Big Pharma is better in this, buying others is a key market tactic. Pfizer's handling of the Pharmacia merger is a great example of how to do it - go in hard, literally destroy everything in the target.
Maybe Apple should indeed make some acquisitions with its cash hoard - but it seems to me that the kinds of prospects that would fit best with its vision are companies focused on engineering great hardware-centric products which consumers love. eBay and PayPal don't match that vision.
I always thought Yahoo would have been a good acquisition for Apple, back when Yahoo were courting Microsoft and Apple was getting its feet wet with iAds.<p>Buying eBay/Paypal would be interesting but the same could be said for Google buying them.
<i>"I think Ballmer has a lot he ought to be proud of. So he didn't get everything right - not many people do."</i><p>The mind boggles. He's probably a nice guy, but there's a reason he doesn't work for Apple anymore.
90% of these uber mergers dont really add value and end up destroying companies <i>snif</i> DEC being a premier example - of course merchant bankers and lawyers get a metric shit ton of cash for advice
I cannot imagine any use Apple would have for eBay / PayPal. They seem like they would be more effort than they are worth. I could see Adobe and AMD.
<a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=EBAY" rel="nofollow">http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=EBAY</a> $70 Billion market cap so they might need to offer around $90 Billion to be taken seriously. That's a nice chunk.<p>Maybe they should buy an enterprise company and get serious money from businesses too.