“All of a sudden, the spotlight is on Microsoft again”

Microsoft is the improbable alliance of the Excel spreadsheet and nice little builders of Minecraft, professional boring and mainstream entertainment. The founder, Bill Gates, has always wanted to maintain the thread between the end consumer and the digital industrial infrastructure. Today, his successor, Satya Nadella, is following in his footsteps.

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The architect of Microsoft’s discreet success in cloud computing strikes a blow with the largest acquisition in its history, that of Activision Blizzard: nearly 70 billion dollars (about 61 billion euros) paid entirely in cash, without trading shares. Suddenly, the spotlight is once again on a company that has been keeping a low profile for ten years.

A pet peeve of global regulators, it ruled the early days of the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s. At a time when the founders of Google were still in college, the firm went to court for having abused its dominant position with Windows in order to impose its content. Between 2004 and 2008, the firm was sentenced to 2 billion euros in fines imposed by the European Commission.

Intact obsession

Then the rise of Google, Facebook and Amazon, and its failure in mobile telephony against Apple, made the PC king old fashioned. So much so that the acronym GAFA, obsession of the 2010s, stupidly forgot it. Still, with $168 billion in revenue, the company may have been overtaken by Google, but remains an industry behemoth with a market capitalization of $2.27 trillion second only to Apple.

The acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the biggest independent video game publisher, shows that the obsession with vertical integration is intact at Microsoft and that regulators would do well to look into the matter, as they should have. when Facebook bought WhatsApp (2014) and Instagram (2012).

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Because for competitors, this is bad news. The operation strengthens its Azure cloud division upstream at a time when video games are shifting to streaming (online gaming), and downstream, it poses the threat of favoring its Xbox console for future opuses of World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and other star games from Activision Blizzard. An unmistakable sign, when the operation was announced on January 18, Sony, a great rival in the game, lost nearly 20 billion dollars in market capitalization. The battle has only begun.

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