AuthenTec sells out to Apple to the sound of 1,000 lawsuits

Or Apple could just pay more. It's not as if Apple can't buy Samsung, Apple need $50-60 billion more to buy with cash so say 9-12 months from now. The problem is Samsung or anyone else dosn't know what Apple are planning, so do you outbid Apple just for the sake of it? I think this has something to do with NFC and paymant systems but what are they planning?

You can't just outbid Apple whenever they choose to try to buy a company, that is reactive and a waste of money since Apple can just come back and offer you newly aquired emploess a $1 million signing bonus. You have to have a plan and be willing to fail now to succed later. Or as Samsung do, willing to get fucked later to get in a position where it dosn't matter.

Given how Apple seem to work, im sure they have 3 back up plans. I really admire both companies, both are ruthless when it comes to business though they work in different ways. I suspect Samsung will become much more Apple like and that will be fun to watch, I think the Chinese copycats are going to be seved a lesson in business by Samsung and Apple will be the first trillion dollar company.

OK they need to come out with an iPhone click /iPod XL /iPad mini/nano/whatever but as it is said we live in interesting times. Will Samsung become the Sony of the 80's, I think they could, fuck knows what Apple could do as they have already moved beyond Sony.

Re: AuthenTec has only quarterly revenues just over $10bn - wrong

Shouldn't have been possible to type that sentence without alarm bells going off. $10b/qtr is huge, GM-scale. $365M would be an insanely low price for something that takes $40b/yr. Obvious inconsistency.

Re: AuthenTec has only quarterly revenues just over $10bn - wrong

And you didn't see the 'send corrections' button at the bottom of the article?

Re: If 'we' cannot see the point in instigating further bids...

<sigh> Isn't the innanet wonderful ? Only place (OK apart from AM radio) where some random dude can assume he's smarter than the CEO and entire board of a company that just brought in the mother-load for their investors.

Newsflash genius. The CEO already _knew_ why Apple were interested. It's his job to know and it's also his job to shop his company and their wares around to anyone who might take an interest. It's also his (or her since I confess I don't know) job to know the current value of the company. It's also the job of Apple's M&A people to know how much over the top of that value they have to pay in order to clinch a deal.

Oh and if you want to go sidewalk lawyer, you should know that 'dereliction of fiduciary duty' is _always_ actionable (that's why the class action lawyers are circling doofus), it's just tough to prove in some cases and I'll stick my neck out here and say based on my second paragraph, pretty unlikely in this case.

Re: Your rival may get many more viewers by NOT banning it

There are no rivals - except the pirates, and of course then you don't need all of this technology to 'allow' you the watch the stuff you just paid for, you can watch it anywhere.

Really, in a number of ways I support the TPB simply because the low bar to accessing 'pirated' material has, or hopefully will, make the content industry realise its not so precious after all and that if they want my money they have to make the experience of legal purchase easy and effective for me, on any of my devices.

Does any one out there really want stronger DRM to be baked in to the hardware and further restrictions on what you can and cannot do with YOUR hardware becoming the norm? Screw you Apple!