Microsoft is buying Nuance for $ 16 billion
Microsoft has announced that it has reached an agreement on the acquisition of the company Nuance, worth 16 billion dollars. Nuance specializes in speech recognition and will help Microsoft become more involved in the healthcare industry, as their technologies are widely used for transcription and dictation in healthcare facilities. This is, by the way, the second-largest acquisition of Microsoft, right after the purchase of LinkedIn, whose value was 26 billion dollars.
The artificial intelligence developed by Nuance, among other things, ten years ago helped in the development of Apple's digital assistant - Siri. After that, the company changed its focus on healthcare institutions and developed its own line of speech recognition tools called Dragon.
Microsoft announced the purchase of this company in April last year, but everything was temporarily stopped after the British antimonopoly regulatory body launched an investigation in order to determine whether such an action would give the company a monopoly position on the market. It was decided a few days ago that this will not be the case, so Microsoft is now ready to finish starting the business.
By the way, Microsoft will (most likely) not only dwell on this big acquisition this year. In January, he announced that he planned to buy the well-known game manufacturer, Activision Blizzard, for almost 70 billion dollars, which will be definitely his biggest acquisition in history.
Recall, Microsoft bought Activision for $ 68.7 billion
Shares of Activision rose about 37 percent in the market before stopping after the Wall Street Journal first published an agreement between the two companies.
Also, Microsoft shares fell more than 2 percent after the announcement. This would be the largest Microsoft acquisition to date, following LinkedIn’s 2016 purchase of $ 26.2 billion.
Activision, known for popular games such as Call of Duty and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, has been mired in controversy in recent months following reports of sexual misconduct and harassment among company executives. On Monday, Activision said it had fired dozens of executives following an investigation.
Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, who has faced calls to resign over cultural issues at his company, will remain CEO during the transition. Microsoft said Activision as a company will report to Microsoft's Xbox boss Phil Spencer after the deal is signed, implying that Kotick could leave after the transition.
Microsoft certainly has a long-term vision
It is certain that Microsoft has become more aggressive in the gaming business in the last few years. He bought Minecraft manufacturer Mojang for $ 2.5 billion in 2014. Last year, Microsoft completed the purchase of Bethesda, a game maker for $ 7.5 billion.
The company certainly has a long-term vision as it competes with Met in building technologies to create a virtual world called the metaverse. Given that, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was the first CEO of Big Tech to publicly acknowledge the value of the metaverse, months before Mark Zuckerberg.
"When we think about our vision of what a metaverse can be, we believe that there will be no one, centralized metaverse," Nadella said. This would mean that Nadella sees an opportunity for many software producers to create many different virtual worlds in the future, instead of one dominant company controlling most of the activities.
In addition, both companies focused on the present when announcing the contract, emphasizing the strength of Activision in mobile gaming. Also, Activision owns Candy Crush, one of the most popular and lucrative mobile games. They also highlighted the opportunity to cross-promote popular gaming franchises of both companies, such as Microsoft’s Halo and Activision’s World of Warcraft.
"The last two years have shown in particular how critical games are to help people maintain a sense of community and belonging, even when separated," Nadella said in a conference call following the announcement of the agreement. He added that 3 billion people worldwide play video games, which is a hint of the total market that Microsoft is counting on.
