List of Mergers and Acquisitions By Microsoft - Key Acquisitions

Key Acquisitions

Microsoft's first acquisition was Forethought on June 29, 1987. Forethought was founded in 1983 and developed a presentation program that would later be known as Microsoft PowerPoint.

On December 31, 1997, Microsoft acquired Hotmail for $500 million, its largest acquisition at the time, and integrated Hotmail into its MSN group of services. Hotmail, a free webmail service founded in 1996 by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, had more than 8.5 million subscribers earlier that month.

Microsoft acquired Seattle-based Visio Corporation on January 7, 2000 for $1.375 billion. Visio, a software company, was founded in 1990 as Axon Corporation, and had its initial public offering in November 1995. The company developed the diagramming application software, Visio, which was integrated into Microsoft's product line as Microsoft Visio after its acquisition.

On July 12, 2002, Microsoft purchased Navision for $1.33 billion. The company, which developed the technology for the Microsoft Dynamics NAV enterprise resource planning software, was integrated into Microsoft as a new division named Microsoft Business Solutions, later renamed to Microsoft Dynamics.

Microsoft purchased aQuantive, an advertising company, on August 13, 2007 for $7.333 billion. Before the acquisition, aQuantive was ranked 14th in terms of revenue among advertising agencies worldwide. aQuantive had three subsidiaries at the time of the acquisition: Avenue A/Razorfish, one of the world's largest digital agencies, Atlas Solutions, and DRIVE Performance Solutions. Microsoft acquired the Norwegian enterprise search company Fast Search & Transfer on April 25, 2008 for $1.191 billion to boost its search technology.