7 of Microsoft's biggest acquisitions, from Activision Blizzard to Nokia

Microsoft $MSFT's largest purchases map the company's reach well beyond Windows and Office. Its biggest deals have pulled in video game publishers, a professional social network, an internet calling service, a code-hosting platform, a speech-recognition specialist and a phone maker's handset business. Those buys explain why LinkedIn, GitHub and Call of Duty share a corporate parent.

This guide covers seven of Microsoft's biggest acquisitions. It is a selection of large deals, not a complete record of everything the company has bought. The slides run roughly from the highest announced price to the lowest.

The list opens with Activision $ATVI Blizzard. Microsoft announced the $68.7 billion deal for the game publisher in January 2022. It is the largest acquisition in Microsoft's history. LinkedIn follows at $26.2 billion in cash, and Nuance Communications comes next at about $19.7 billion. Further down are Skype at $8.5 billion and Nokia's devices and services business, which brought the Lumia phone line to Microsoft.

The deals span more than a decade. Skype, announced in May 2011, is the oldest on this list. Activision Blizzard, which closed on October 13, 2023, after regulatory reviews in several jurisdictions, is the most recent to close.

A few comparisons need care. GitHub and ZeniMax Media carried the same announced price of $7.5 billion. Their order here is an editorial choice, not a ranking. Microsoft paid for GitHub in its own stock, while the LinkedIn price was paid in cash.

The Nokia deal was priced at 5.44 billion euros. Exchange rates differ by date and source. This guide keeps that figure in euros and does not convert it. The euro figure does not line up directly against the dollar-priced deals.

Each slide covers when Microsoft announced the purchase, when the deal closed and what the acquired company made or ran. All prices are the figures announced at the time, not later valuations. The guide makes no claims about how any deal performed after closing.

Illustration: Quartz

Microsoft $MSFT announced in January 2022 that it would buy Activision $ATVI Blizzard for $68.7 billion. It is the largest acquisition in Microsoft's history. The deal closed on October 13, 2023.

Antitrust reviews in the U.S., Europe and the U.K. account for the gap of nearly two years between announcement and completion. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission sued to block the purchase in December 2022. The European Commission approved it in May 2023 after Microsoft offered commitments on cloud game streaming.

The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority was the last major hurdle. It blocked the original deal in April 2023, citing concerns about competition in cloud gaming. Microsoft restructured the transaction. It agreed to sell the cloud streaming rights for Activision's games outside the European Economic Area to Ubisoft. The authority cleared the revised deal the same day it closed.

The company Microsoft bought was itself the product of a merger. Activision, a game publisher founded in 1979, combined with Vivendi Games in 2008 to form Activision Blizzard. Vivendi Games was the parent of Blizzard Entertainment, the studio behind several of the combined company's best-known franchises.

Call of Duty is the publisher's flagship series. The military first-person shooter debuted in 2003 and has since appeared on PlayStation, Xbox and PC. Its availability on rival consoles became a central issue in the regulatory fight. In July 2023, Microsoft and Sony $SONY signed an agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation.

Blizzard contributed World of Warcraft, the online role-playing game it launched in 2004. Its catalog also includes the Diablo, StarCraft and Overwatch series.

The deal also brought in King, the mobile developer that Activision Blizzard bought in 2016. King makes Candy Crush, the puzzle franchise that began with Candy Crush Saga in 2012. That unit added a mobile games business to Microsoft's console and PC lineup.

When it announced the purchase, Microsoft said Activision Blizzard would report to Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming. That group also oversees the Xbox brand.

Illustration: Quartz

Microsoft $MSFT announced in June 2016 that it would buy LinkedIn, the professional social network, for $26.2 billion in cash. The deal closed in December 2016. LinkedIn has operated as a separate unit within Microsoft since then.

The offer worked out to $196 per LinkedIn share. At the time, it was the largest acquisition Microsoft had ever announced.

LinkedIn was already a publicly traded company when Microsoft made its offer. Reid Hoffman cofounded the business, and the site launched in 2003. LinkedIn went public on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2011.

The company earned revenue from several lines of business. Employers paid for recruiting tools to search for and contact job candidates. Marketers bought advertising aimed at professional audiences. Individual members could pay for premium subscriptions with extra search and messaging features.

LinkedIn also brought its own earlier purchases into Microsoft. It had bought SlideShare, a site for sharing presentations, in 2012. In 2015 it bought Lynda.com, an online course provider, for $1.5 billion. That business later became LinkedIn Learning, which sells video training on software, business and creative skills.

LinkedIn's leadership stayed in place after the deal. Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn's chief executive in 2016, kept that role and reported to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Hoffman joined Microsoft's board of directors in 2017. Ryan Roslansky succeeded Weiner as LinkedIn's CEO in 2020. Weiner moved to the role of executive chairman.

The purchase also went through a regulatory review in Europe. The European Commission cleared the deal in December 2016 after Microsoft offered a set of commitments. Under them, PC makers in the European Economic Area could choose not to install LinkedIn on Windows. Windows users could also remove LinkedIn if a PC maker had installed it. Rival professional networks kept their existing interoperability with Microsoft Office. The commitments ran for five years.

LinkedIn kept its own brand, website and mobile app after the acquisition.

Illustration: Quartz

Nuance Communications, the speech-recognition company behind Dragon dictation software, agreed in April 2021 to be bought by Microsoft $MSFT for about $19.7 billion. The deal closed in March 2022, roughly 11 months after it was announced.

Nuance was based in Burlington, Massachusetts. Its core technology turned spoken words into text and commands. By the time Microsoft made its offer, healthcare had become the company's main focus.

That focus centered on clinical documentation. Nuance sold software that lets doctors and nurses dictate patient notes instead of typing them into electronic health records. The goal is to cut the time clinicians spend at a keyboard during and after appointments.

The Dragon name is older than Nuance's ownership of it. The product line began at Dragon Systems, a Massachusetts company that released Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows PCs in 1997. Belgian speech company Lernout & Hauspie bought Dragon Systems in 2000. ScanSoft acquired the Dragon assets in 2001 and took the Nuance name in 2005 after merging with Nuance.

Nuance built several healthcare products on that foundation. Dragon Medical One is a cloud-based dictation service for clinicians. Dragon Ambient eXperience, known as DAX, is designed to listen to a conversation between a doctor and a patient and draft a clinical note from it.

The purchase fit a healthcare push already under way at Microsoft. The company had launched Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare in 2020, a set of cloud services aimed at hospitals and health systems. Nuance brought speech software that was already in use inside clinics and hospitals.

Mark Benjamin, Nuance's chief executive, stayed on to lead the business after the deal. He reported to Scott Guthrie, who ran Microsoft's Cloud + AI group.

The acquisition went through antitrust review in Europe and the U.K. before it closed. The European Commission cleared it in December 2021. The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority approved it in March 2022 after examining its effects on competition.

Illustration: Quartz

Microsoft $MSFT announced in May 2011 that it would buy Skype, the internet calling and video-chat service, for $8.5 billion. The deal closed in October 2011.

Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark. Engineers in Estonia wrote much of its early software. The two founders had previously built Kazaa, the file-sharing program.

The service let people make voice calls over the internet using peer-to-peer technology. Calls between two Skype users cost nothing. A paid feature called SkypeOut let users ring ordinary landlines and mobile phones. Video calling arrived in 2006 and became one of the service's best-known features.

Skype changed owners more than once before Microsoft stepped in. Online marketplace eBay acquired the company in 2005. In 2009, eBay sold a majority stake to an investor group led by the private equity firm Silver Lake. That group controlled Skype when Microsoft agreed to buy it.

Skype was based in Luxembourg at the time of the sale. Under the terms Microsoft announced, Skype became a new business division inside the company. Tony Bates, Skype's chief executive, became president of that division. He reported to Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft's CEO.

After the deal closed, Microsoft folded Skype into its wider set of communications products. One of those was Lync, Microsoft's messaging and conferencing software for businesses. Lync was later renamed Skype for Business. The change carried the consumer brand into Microsoft's workplace product line.

That rename put one name in front of two different audiences. Consumers knew Skype as a way to call friends and family in other countries. Corporate IT departments knew Lync as a tool for internal chat, online meetings and office phone systems.

When Microsoft announced the deal, the $8.5 billion price made it the largest acquisition in Microsoft's history at that point. It surpassed the roughly $6 billion Microsoft agreed to pay in 2007 for aQuantive, an online advertising company.

Illustration: Quartz

Microsoft $MSFT announced in June 2018 that it would buy GitHub, the code-hosting platform, for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. The deal closed in October 2018. GitHub has continued to operate as a separate unit within Microsoft.

GitHub launched in 2008 and is based in San Francisco. Its service is built on Git, the open-source version-control system that Linus Torvalds created in 2005 to manage development of the Linux kernel. Git records every change made to a codebase. GitHub added web hosting and a browser interface on top of it. That made those changes easier to share, discuss and review.

The platform organizes work around a few core features. A repository holds a project's code along with its full history. A pull request proposes a change and lets other contributors comment on it before it is merged. Issues track bugs and feature requests. Forking lets anyone copy a public project and build on it independently.

That model made GitHub a central home for open-source software. Many large public projects keep their code there. Companies also use private repositories on the platform for internal work. Individual developers often treat their GitHub profiles as a public record of the code they have written.

Leadership changed when the deal closed. Chris Wanstrath, a GitHub co-founder, had been chief executive. Nat Friedman took over as GitHub's CEO. Friedman had co-founded the developer-tools company Xamarin and joined Microsoft when it bought that firm. Thomas Dohmke succeeded Friedman as CEO in November 2021.

Microsoft's own approach to open source had shifted in the years before the deal. The company announced in 2014 that it would open-source its .NET Core framework. In 2015 it introduced Visual Studio Code, a free code editor whose source is also public.

GitHub kept launching products around and after the acquisition. GitHub Actions, a tool for automating how code is built, tested and deployed, was announced in October 2018. GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant developed with OpenAI, arrived as a technical preview in June 2021.

Illustration: Quartz

Microsoft $MSFT announced in September 2020 that it would buy ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion. ZeniMax is the parent of Bethesda Softworks, whose franchises include The Elder Scrolls and Fallout.

The deal closed in March 2021. The European Commission cleared it earlier that month without conditions. The purchase brought Bethesda and its sister studios into Microsoft's gaming business, which is organized around the Xbox brand.

ZeniMax was a privately held company based in Rockville, Maryland. Robert Altman and Christopher Weaver founded it in 1999. Weaver had started Bethesda Softworks in 1986. The publisher took its name from Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., where it began.

Bethesda Game Studios, the in-house team led by Todd Howard, makes the main Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. The Elder Scrolls series began with The Elder Scrolls: Arena in 1994. Its fifth main entry, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, came out in November 2011.

Fallout began at another company. Interplay Entertainment published the original Fallout in 1997. Bethesda later acquired the franchise and released Fallout 3 in 2008. Fallout 4 followed in 2015.

The deal covered more than Bethesda's own role-playing games. ZeniMax had built a group of studios over the previous decade. One was id Software, the Texas developer behind Doom and Quake. Doom first came out in 1993. ZeniMax bought id in 2009.

Arkane Studios, maker of Dishonored, also came with the purchase. So did MachineGames, the Swedish studio behind the Wolfenstein games released since 2014. Tango Gameworks in Japan was part of the group as well.

ZeniMax Online Studios completed the lineup. It runs The Elder Scrolls Online, a multiplayer game set in the same fantasy world as the main series. The game launched in 2014.

Microsoft said at the announcement that Bethesda games would be added to Xbox Game Pass. Game Pass is Microsoft's subscription service for console and PC players. Members pay a monthly fee for access to a library of games that changes over time.

Illustration: Quartz

Microsoft $MSFT announced in September 2013 that it would buy Nokia's devices and services business for 5.44 billion euros. The deal closed in April 2014 and brought Nokia's Lumia smartphone line inside Microsoft.

Nokia is a Finnish company based in Espoo, near Helsinki. For years it was known around the world mainly as a maker of mobile phones. The unit Microsoft bought covered that handset business, including Lumia smartphones and Nokia's lower-cost feature phones.

The purchase built on an existing partnership. In February 2011, Nokia announced that it would adopt Microsoft's Windows Phone as its main smartphone platform. Lumia handsets came out of that arrangement. The first models, the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, were unveiled in October 2011. They ran Microsoft's mobile operating system from their launch. Buying the business put the phone hardware and the software under one owner.

Nokia did not sell the whole company. It kept its telecom network equipment business, its HERE mapping unit and its patent portfolio. Microsoft received a 10-year license to Nokia's patents rather than ownership of them. Nokia also kept ownership of its brand name. The agreement let Microsoft use the Nokia brand on feature phones for 10 years.

Leadership at Microsoft changed while the deal was pending. Steve Ballmer was Microsoft's chief executive when the purchase was announced. He had said in August 2013 that he would retire. Nokia shareholders approved the sale in November 2013. Satya Nadella took over as CEO in February 2014. The deal closed that April, with Nadella in charge.

Stephen Elop, Nokia's chief executive at the time, had joined Nokia from Microsoft in 2010. Before joining Nokia, he had run Microsoft's Business Division, the unit responsible for Office. He returned to Microsoft through the acquisition. There he led the company's devices group as an executive vice president.

The Lumia name continued after the transfer. Microsoft later began selling phones under the Microsoft Lumia brand, starting with the Lumia 535 in late 2014.