Andrew Sorkin’s Suggestions for an Apple Shopping List

Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin made a list of potential big acquisitions on which Apple could spend its $117 billion (and growing ever more rapidly) cash hoard:

  • Nuance
  • Twitter
  • Path
  • RIM
  • Square
  • Sprint

The only ones on that list that make sense to me are Nuance (under Apple’s oft-cited rule that the company seeks to “own and control the primary technology” in everything they do — speech recognition is now one of Apple’s primary technologies) and maybe Square.

Acquiring Sprint makes no sense, unless you think of the iPhone and iPad as U.S.-only products, which also makes no sense. I could see Apple buying RIM for its patent portfolio after RIM goes bankrupt, but that’s more likely to happen through a consortium, like the Nortel deal.

It’s hard to spend $117 billion wisely.

★ Tuesday, 31 July 2012