Acquisitions
Microsoft has acquired several companies and products during its history, including some that competed with earlier Microsoft products. Such acquired assets include DOS (Seattle Computer Products QDOS), FrontPage (Vermeer Technologies Incorporated FrontPage), WebTV (now MSN TV), Hotmail, Direct3D, Internet Explorer (Spyglass, Inc. Mosaic), Visio (Visio Corporation Visio), Windows Virtual PC (Connectix Virtual PC), and Windows Defender (GIANT Company Software, Inc. GIANT AntiSpyware). Microsoft rebrands the primary products of the companies it acquires, and in many cases offers them for free or bundles them with their operating system. Former Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy occasionally remarked that Microsoft never produced technology except by buying it: "R&D and M&A are the same thing over there."
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