Not sure what that has to do with anything. M&A = inorganic growth. That's the definition. My point is they are both doing inorganic growth, one just happens to be doing it at a much larger scale. You may not like the definition but it is what it is.
Sony fostered those companies, they made largely or entirely only Sony content, after they proved market viability the founders got a big check and business otherwise went on per usual. Those studios don't exist in their current forms without literally years and millions of dollars of Sony investment prior to acquisition.
Microsoft buys large, independent third parties with no prior co-development relationships, changes basically nothing, other than the business management layer. Added nothing to the company up to that point, only argument for additional value is how much money they can pour into it in the future.
See the difference?
Yes, of course they are.
Facebook doesn't just sell your data. Facebook uses your data -- provably -- to make genocide more efficient. There's a big gulf in selling your data and using your data, provably, to enable mass murder.
Facebook also leaks your data. Facebook also provides your data to corporations that are using your data to more efficiently elect would-be authoritarian leaders, and then Facebook denies that they're doing that, and then it's PROVEN that they did that, and then Facebook
And they do all of that with your data they bought from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc..
And where do you draw the line on mass murder? Microsoft actively provides services to the US DoD, a collective umbrella that orchestrated two multi-decade wars that has directly contributed to over a hundred thousand civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
People use Facebook's services to orchestrate plans for murder = Facebook bad.
Microsoft provides software that helps target drone strikes = Not MS' fault.
is that the rationale here?
I never implied or suggested that "Microsoft has taken the high ground," or something, but Microsoft is a far better run company today and over the last decade than Facebook, which is arguably the most or among the most malicious companies on earth. And FWIW, Facebook's acquistions of Instagram and WhatsApp should be grounds for anti-trust if we continued to invest in regulatory industries as the same rate as we did 25 years ago when Microsoft was investigated and charges with anti-trust.
Absolutely agree on the last point, sure, but I don't see how Microsoft is a "better" company today than Facebook. They operate with the same market goals, with people exercising the same playbook.
The only difference is that Facebook's core market is more publicly toxic day to day, but if MS wound up with a Facebook level social media platform would they do any better? The way they aggregate and promote right wing stories as normal news within their web platform's default home pages and their routine inability to clean up XBLA doesn't give a lot of faith.