Maybe there was simply some lingering cheer left over from the holiday weekend, or maybe there’s something in the air that the rest of us aren’t seeing, but yesterday it seemed the climate was just right for some huge, HUGE checks to be signed. We all heard about team Zuckerburg and its billion-dollar acquisition of everyone’s new favorite photo sharing program Instagram, but the Facebook gang wasn’t the only one making game-changing moves on a not-so-quiet Monday.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced it would be buying 800 patents from AOL for just over a billion dollars, and, not to be outdone, AT&T announced its own billion dollar deal, selling its majority stake in Yellow Pages to Cerberus Capital. All of these transactions made big headlines in business publications worldwide, but as always our interest is focused on the mobile world, which promises to see a significant impact from each of these deals.
The obvious place to start in this discussion is with the darling deal of market Monday, which saw Facebook realize its biggest weakness, photo sharing, and address it by tossing a defensive billion dollars at one of its biggest threats. While the deal was a genius tactical business move (if you can wrap your head around the concept of spending a billion dollars being tactical), it also promises to have some major impacts on the mobile web landscape.
With Facebook being the most downloaded app of all time, and Instagram climbing the charts faster than any app ever, the two forming an alliance makes perfect sense and is sure to change the way we share photos on the go. We’ve already seen the folks at Facebook make big strides in supporting the mobile web with their commitment to web-based apps, and bringing one of the most effective mobile photo sharing companies along for the ride will only help their case.
AT&T may have been on the other side of the buyers and sellers table yesterday, but that certainly doesn’t mean the company won’t see a benefit in terms of its mobile presence thanks to yesterday’s blockbuster deal. While selling a down-trending company won’t necessarily skyrocket AT&T’s business, and the company itself admits it expects to see little financial benefit from the sale, jettisoning Yellow Pages will allow AT&T to turn its focus to mobile initiatives in a hope to compete with competitors’ growing businesses.
While AT&T was cutting the fat to look to the future, Microsoft was busy doing some strategizing of its own. AOL has long been looking to transition to a more media-focused initiative, recently purchasing The Huffington Post and Techcrunch, so Microsoft was happy to buy up 800 tech patents from AOL, many of which were mobile-oriented. Microsoft has been very publically trying to keep up with competition in the mobile game such as Apple and Google’s Android market, and the acquisition of a slew of new patents may be just the beginning for the tech giant.
So, which billion-dollar baby will have the biggest impact on the mobile world? Well, despite the insistence from the folks at Facebook that nothing will change at Instagram, the sale likely has the most immediate implications of the three moves. Easier sharing of better photos, all streamlined through the mobile landscape, will almost instantly change the way we connect and communicate.
In the long run however, the new weapons that Microsoft acquired may end up being the biggest game-changer. We’ve seen Apple falter sans-Steve Jobs before, and considering some recent slip-ups, it’s not altogether crazy to think it may happen again. Of course, there’s a new rival that Microsoft will have to face head on this time around in the form of a little company called Google, but however the game shakes out, it’s going to get interesting.
Tell us about your thoughts on the billion-dollar deal day we just saw in the comments section below and of course make sure to follow and find us on Twitter @fiddlefly , Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest for more mobile web
This guest post was written by Kostas Papageorgiou, a copywriter from Finland who specializes in mobile technology and mobile market research.
