Quote:
Originally Posted by
asdasd 
So 4 then, and thats all I know too.
Well, there's much more.
Basically all their A/V authoring offering (Final Cut, Shake, Logic, Motion, Garageband, DVD Studio Pro...) was acquired, or developed with freshly acquired IP and engineers.
And most of their iOS multitouch IP is based on the Fingerworks acquisition.
Here you have their complete shopping list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...tions_by_Apple
It's not huge but it's still an average of a couple acquisitions per year since Jobs' return.
And apart from acquisitions, you only have to look at how many key projects are built upon OSS foundations, from webkit to LLVM/Clang, to see that NIH is not such an issue at Apple.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
asdasd
This is pretty much off-topic, but Google buy lots more than that in any given year and probably in any given month.
Yeah, but also Google has a much broader focus regarding software, and they just pump put a lot of experimental/beta stuff and a lot of "just-see-what-sticks" half-assed products.
Apple has much more restrain in choosing its priorities.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
asdasd
Also modern Apple didnt buy NEXT, old Apple bought NEXT.
Many people would say that NeXT bought old Apple for -400m $ =D
Quote:
Originally Posted by
asdasd
And ar we sure about the use of non-Apple hardware in data centres?
Yep, they use Sun gear.
Which, btw, is the main reason Apple was able to discontinue the internal Java development for OS X - there was no need anymore to do the JVM QA in-house for running their mission-critical web services on top of it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
asdasd
Lets just say Apple should buy dropbox - dropbox is very very good and massively better than iDisk, the costs of doing things yourself can add up.
Yeah, dropbox is great and they have a bunch of talented people working on it, but in the end it's a cross-platform project, built around Amazon S3, and based on a single folder sync model.
Which is to say, for Apple's needs there's probably so much stuff in their codebase that has to be dropped, rewritten or repurposed, that they're better off starting their take from scratch.
It's not rocket science for a company with their resources.
Of course, if you look at MobileMe you can very well say that Apple could definitely benefit from acquiring start-ups with engineers that "get" the "cloud", but I guess they're already addressing that with hirings
