Has Microsoft overpaid for Nuance?

$16bn dollars (valued at nearly $20bn) sounds (to me) like a lot of money for a company which seemingly was gradually becoming obsolete due to improvements in Voice Assistants and AI.

Owning the tech behind Siri, and having those kinds of inroads to US healthcare sounds like a good buy to me. There seems to be a lot more than $20bn available there.

It will be interesting to see Apple’s flex in reaction to this.

N.B. Not an MBA.

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Did Microsoft overpay?

“Nuance solutions are currently used by more than 55% of physicians and 75% of radiologists in the U.S., and used in 77% of U.S. hospitals. Nuance’s Healthcare Cloud revenue experienced 37% year-over-year growth in Nuance’s fiscal year 2020”

The global health industry was worth $8.45 trillion in 2018, and that could reach over $10 trillion by 2022.

MS won a $10 billion dollar contract from the Pentagon in 2019, (which may have been withdrawn due to a lawsuit by Amazon). But they recently were awarded a $22 billion contract by the U.S. Army for 120,000 custom HoloLens headsets designed for combat.

Satya Nadella’s Microsoft isn’t the Windows & Office software company he inherited from Steve Ballmer. It’s delivering solutions that is making it a leader in several new areas.

It looks to me that they may know what they are doing.

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I wonder if Microsoft is trying to combine Nuance technology with GPT-3? That would be interesting to see.

Most of the money covers Nuance’s debt. As a result, I don’t think Microsoft overpaid for the acquisition. Satya Nadella and his team are very intelligent and they know what they’re doing. They’re trying to grow the already successful Azure division.

Microsoft’s previous CEO (Steve Ballmer) was a disaster and overpaid for Nokia’s smartphone division when things were already going bad.

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In spite of Windows, Xbox and the like don’t think of Microsoft as a consumer/office suite company. They’ve moved way beyond that.

Applie’s idea of services is very consumer focued; music, video, fitness, etc. Microsoft’s service focus is all about business. That’s where this purchase fits.

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Solid purchase. Nuance’s Patent Portfolio in the area of Speech Recognition will shield Microsoft from capricious litigation and provide a solid core to build the next generation Cortana Voice Enabled systems.

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Microsoft quickly gave up on Cortana. It’s being neglected.