Top 10 technology marriages made in heaven

Relationships that have blessed the IT industry

The UK is taking a break today to celebrate the Royal Wedding, and we thought we'd take a moment to reflect on great weddings that have proved a success in the technology industry.

The nuptials of Catherine Elizabeth Middleton and William Arthur Philip Louis Windsor, Duke of Cambridge, is a happy event for the couple and their families, and it seems that a large part of the world is awash with news of the double balcony kiss or Pippa Middleton in that dress. For some, the adulation of the monarchy today is excessive, and they have a point.

But to my American friends who make snarky comments about monarchy I would remind them that it's not too long ago that the US was ruled by an incompetent who got the job because of his parents.

We've covered the Top 10 mergers already in these lists, but what's been nice about this wedding is that it hasn't been a traditional merging of monarchical families, but a relationship borne of romance. So instead we're looking at some of the greatest corporate relationships the industry has thrown together, that ended in marriage or simple cohabitation.

Honourable Mention: Dell/Intel
Iain Thomson: We've got to be slightly careful with this one for legal reasons, so let's call it the love that dare not speak its name.

Dell, as the largest systems builder in the market for a long time, has naturally had a close relationship with Intel for many years. When new chipsets became available Dell was almost always there at launch with a new model or three, and in return benefitted from primary access to new technology so that the latest systems came online as soon as possible.

However, there are some who felt that the relationship was too close for comfort. For years AMD executives complained that they couldn't get a foot in the door with Dell for any major deployment of their chips. Even when AMD's Opteron server chip was beating Intel's offerings like a red-headed stepchild, Dell held off.

Intel and AMD have settled their disagreements now, with no fault attached, but it appears that for many years Dell was getting serious incentives from Intel, which helped the company's bottom line considerably. The two companies are moving apart now, but one suspects the relationship was much closer than anyone thought.

Shaun Nichols: As Iain noted, this one was never officially acknowledged, so you'll have to excuse my heavy use of the word 'allegedly'.

Intel and Dell were locked in heated battles at the time. Intel was neck and neck with AMD in the PC and server processor markets, each playing on the other's strengths and weaknesses. Meanwhile, Dell was facing intense competition from HP in the extremely cut-throat PC market, where margins are low and competition high.

Obviously we can't say that anything officially happened, but if you look at the deal the companies allegedly made, you can see where it makes a lot of sense. Intel gets a high-profile customer win with Dell, which in turn gets some discounts that helped the company boost its profits.

Other than the inconvenient fact that the alleged deal was illegal, it would have been a very nice arrangement for the two parties involved.

Honourable Mention: Intel/McAfee
Shaun Nichols: This was a recent tie-up, perhaps one that is still in its honeymoon period. But so far, the merger between Intel and McAfee looks promising.

There has long been talk that McAfee was looking to be acquired by a larger vendor, and after several years of speculation, Intel ponied up $8bn for the security firm.

This deal could pay dividends for both companies on the silicon level. McAfee could offer security tools for use directly on Intel's chips, allowing an even deeper level of malware prevention. Additionally, the partnership opens up the embedded computing market, which is emerging as a new target for attacks.

There are some potential issues to work out, however. In order to avoid possible anti-trust actions, Intel will need to open its platforms to offer competing security firms the same level of access McAfee enjoys.

Iain Thomson: There was more than a little WTF? going on when Intel announced its merger with McAfee, but it makes more and more sense as you think about it.

The current security situation is untenable. Security firms like McAfee are still too reliant on signature-based anti-virus control, and that just doesn't work any more. For all the advances in heuristics and behavioural monitoring, the IT industry has yet to solve the problem of holes in software.

Hardware, on the other hand, offers considerable advantages against current malware attacks. True, a hardware chip is limited to a single platform, but it's incredibly hard to hack from outside.

Add a software protection layer on top and you'll see something much more secure, and which ties the user to a set of vendors. Win-win as far as Intel/McAfee are concerned, but will businesses buy in?

Top 10 technology marriages made in heaven

Relationships that have blessed the IT industry

10. Google/YouTube
Shaun Nichols: Google has a business model that relies on getting its content in front of as many people as possible, and if there is one thing YouTube can offer, it is eyeballs.

When YouTube was acquired by Google in 2006, many remarked that the deal was exactly what YouTube needed. The fast-growing video site was under siege from numerous legal complaints owing to the posting of copyrighted material. Behind Google's ample legal resources, the cases were mostly settled, although copyright violations and takedowns remain an issue.

Google has, however, struggled a bit in implementing a consistent advertising platform for YouTube and, now that the company is collecting ad fees from YouTube videos, the copyright violation issue has become even more pressing.

Iain Thomson: This one wasn't so much a marriage as the mistress getting her feet under the table very quickly.

Google was enamoured with YouTube like Humbert to Haze - passion without reason. YouTube has a hugely important position on the internet, yet makes very little money. Google has the same position but has worked out how to make a buck or two along the way.

Google's own Video service was doing well enough, but YouTube has supplanted it very quickly and now Google is shutting down its own service. It's a logical move, but it's difficult to see what Google's getting out of the relationship.

9. Yahoo/Microsoft
Iain Thomson: This one scored so low on the list because, to be frank, it's far from sure whether it'll all end in a fairy tale wedding.

Yahoo basically had no choice on this one, and many of us expected it to be a one-sided deal for Microsoft. Redmond offered to throw stupid amounts of cash at Yahoo, but founder and chief executive Jerry Yang spurned them at every turn, and consequently missed his chance to make a number of investors and employees very rich.

As Yahoo slowly imploded the board decided they'd had enough; it hired a practical chief executive in Carol Bartz and made a deal. Steve Ballmer tried, and failed, to keep the smug grin off his face when the agreement was announced.

But, despite its unfortunate start, this relationship looks like a real goer. Microsoft wins because it gets essential search market share. You can only survive in the search market as a big player, and Bing has received a notable boost from Yahoo.

On Yahoo's side it gets time, and cash, to reinvent itself. No-one's quite sure what that will be yet, or whether it will even be viable, but it gives the company time to find itself.

Shaun Nichols: While it may not be the hefty payday investors were looking for when the acquisition talks were going on, Yahoo did get some value from the search deal Bartz ended up making.

Yahoo does get a nice upgrade to its search engine by switching to the Bing algorithms, while the company can focus on improving its advertising operation. At least, that was how it was supposed to have worked out.

Now it seems that the rollout is being met with the ever-present "technical difficulties" which Yahoo is blaming for missing its profit estimates. It seems that this tenuous marriage may already be hitting a rocky patch.

Top 10 technology marriages made in heaven

Relationships that have blessed the IT industry

8. IBM/Lotus
Shaun Nichols: In the 1990s, IBM was in need of a makeover. The enterprise IT market was moving to a client/server model, and the company needed some new platforms in order to get with the times.

At the same time, Lotus was struggling to keep up in the market with Microsoft's Office package. Once dominant in the enterprise space, Lotus began to fall back a bit as Windows 95 took hold.

After some wrangling, IBM was able to work out a $3.5bn acquisition deal, giving the company a much-needed enterprise communications and productivity offering. You can also argue that the acquisition has helped Lotus, which has had the backing of an enterprise IT hardware powerhouse in Big Blue.

Iain Thomson: This was a marriage that both companies needed, but the results haven't been good. This week I told an analyst that Notes was giving me problems and you could almost hear the horrified wonder in his response. "Notes?"

To be fair, in its day, Lotus Notes was not a bad little email system. The company may have been founded on its 1-2-3 package, but Notes was a brave attempt to extend itself, albeit one doomed by bad management and the misfortune of going up against Microsoft at its most aggressive.

IBM got a certain amount of credibility from the deal with Lotus, and proved smart at keeping the right people from both companies and winnowing out the excess flab. But it really couldn't beat Bill Gates and his leverage.

7. AMD/ATI
I ain Thomson: Shaun and I argued about this one. I thought it should be higher while he - ever the cynic - said wait and see.

True, AMD paid through the nose for ATI, but I really think it got its money's worth. When I come across people who really care about graphics performance they almost invariably use an integrated AMD/ATI system. The merged companies have become very good indeed at building everyday systems that can handle things like gaming with superlative ease.

There's another benefit to the relationship. GPU design is where it's at these days and the savants of the chip design world aren't to be found at Intel, AMD or ARM. When it comes to CPU design the industry is focused on getting down to transistors in the low teens of the nanometre range and then hoping something else comes along. GPU is pushing the envelope.

GPU designers are taking the abilities of graphics chips and applying the design to all sorts of supercomputers, and the results speak for themselves. High performance computing is all about GPU integration at the moment, and good designers are rarer than hens' teeth.

I think this one deserves to be higher in the list, and I'm confident the fruits of it will prove my case.

Shaun Nichols: It's not that I think AMD's purchase of ATI was a bad idea; I just think that it was timed poorly.

At the time the deal was made, AMD was struggling to play catch up with Intel and was on the verge of a tough economic stretch that would drag on for more than a year. That it chose to saddle ifself with a multi-billion dollar merger deal just prior was rather unfortunate, to say the least.

That said, I think strategically this was a very wise move by AMD. These days, the lines between the CPU and the graphics processor are constantly being blurred. The multi-threading abilities of graphics chips are proving quite useful to high-performance computing tasks ,and the advantage of having a graphics chip operation in-house has allowed AMD to launch its Fusion platform to great success.

Top 10 technology marriages made in heaven

Relationships that have blessed the IT industry

6. EMC/VMware
Shaun Nichols: This is one merger which could yet pay off its biggest dividends. Storage has been one of the last components of the IT environment to see virtualisation take over. Even with the transition to cloud computing, storage continues to be an on-premise operation, many companies wary of trusting vital corporate data to remotely hosted cloud platforms.

But it seems that the transition to the cloud is all but inevitable, and if EMC wants to keep up with that transition, having a virtualisation platform on hand is going to be vital.

VMware, meanwhile, finds itself in a market that now includes big names such as Microsoft. If the company wants to compete with Redmond's deep pockets and development resources, it can definitely use the help of a large, respected firm such as EMC.

Iain Thomson: The EMC/VMware merger was one of those things that made perfect sense when it happened, but took a lot of people by surprise.

EMC management took a very big risk in trying to sell the deal, but have made it work. This is partly through a willingness to accommodate the new technology arrival, and partly from knowing when to force out people who would impede the integration. The honeymoon was short and sharp, and left both groups better off.

VMware scares a lot of big players in the field because it is disruptive, and left to its own devices could well have been crushed. It needed muscle in the industry, and EMC provided that while remaining far enough removed not to feel like it was taking advantage.

I'm with Shaun on this one: the benefits of this relationship are yet to be fully realised. They could be very good indeed for both companies, taking them further than they would have gone alone, which is one of the essentials of a good relationship.

5. Apple/PA Semi
Iain Thomson: When it comes to productive relationships this one should almost rank higher - Apple and PA have created some truly wonderful things.

When Apple first bought the chip design firm there were some who thought it was a long-term move, but in a very short time Apple was teaching the entire consumer electronics industry a lesson about what integrated design really means.

Processors designed for mass market adoption have to make certain compromises in design in order to appeal to the largest possible range of users. This principle has helped the chip industry grow to the behemoth it is today, but causes certain limitations in performance.

Apple gambled that it was worth investing in your own chip firm, which allows you to build devices around a single, optimised chipset. As we've seen with the iPad, this can put you so far ahead of the competition that unit margins don't matter when performance seals the deal.

Shaun Nichols: Apple hasn't always had the best results when it comes to hardware platforms. The ambitious PowerPC project carried on for more than a decade, but was ultimately doomed by high costs, poor compatibility and production delays.

FireWire was touted as the next great breakthrough for peripheral device connections, but high costs and poor compatibility ultimately doomed it as well.

But it seems that the purchase of PA Semi might be one hardware undertaking that will serve Apple well. The merger gave Apple a platform and set of personnel who knew exactly what it would take to design the type of high performance, low-power processors that are becoming requirements for the latest generations of handsets and tablets.

It could be interesting to see how the market evolves from here. The ARM-based chips Apple is currently using are more than adequate for the time being, but with Intel currently handling processors for Apple's notebooks and desktops, perhaps Atom could also work its way into Apple's systems down the line.

Even if that does happen, it doesn't look like Apple will have any regrets about tying up with PA Semi.

Top 10 technology marriages made in heaven

Relationships that have blessed the IT industry

4. Google/DoubleClick
Shaun Nichols: When Google announced that it had agreed to acquire advertising company DoubleClick, many competitors in the advertising space became very nervous. That is generally a sign of a promising deal.

Google has long relied on advertising for its revenues. Early on, this came through search ads appearing alongside results on the Google search pages. That proved to be a lucrative business, but Google wanted much more.

The addition of DoubleClick supplements that search advertising business with a very strong banner advertising operation. In turn, Google has more money to fund its other projects, such as Maps, Earth and of course the Chrome and Android platforms.

Iain Thomson: A lot of people in the industry cried foul when Google and DoubleClick first started holding hands. They were right to complain, and to be honest Shaun I don't think the results have been worth it - no matter how many funky projects Google puts out.

The search market got locked up by Google as part of this deal, and lack of competition is not good. Thanks to the synergies of Google and DoubleClick the combined companies became incredibly profitable, but also raised the cost of entry so high that competitive forces are annulled.

Government legal teams are still looking at this deal, and it may come around to bite Google on the backside as much as Internet Explorer did for Microsoft, but the overall deal was good for both companies.

3. eBay/PayPal
Iain Thomson: Meg Whitman's purchase of Skype may be one of the worst decisions of her career, besides spending dollars per vote in California and still losing, but the merger with PayPal was inspired.

It was the perfect marriage - the world's top auction site and the means to pay for goods online. The merger not only paid huge dividends to the creators, but established an online currency system that crossed the chasm of consumer acceptance.

Millions of people use PayPal every day to conduct online transactions. In the early days of the internet there were all kinds of concerns, right up to government level, that online currencies would disrupt governments, and possibly whole economic systems. Instead we got something that didn't ruffle too many feathers, allowed e-commerce to grow and served the greater good.

Shaun Nichols: This is one of those deals which, in hindsight, seemed like a no-brainer. EBay was a massive marketplace sorely in need of a safe, secure method for handling payments. PayPal was an online currency system which was in need of a platform. When they got together, both companies were able to take off.

I think that PayPal use may only expand in the coming years, as people become more aware of the possible dangers of cyber crime and fraud. Having a system which can allow you to make online purchases without needing to hand your credit card details over to every vendor will appeal to more and more consumers as time goes on.

Even if that doesn't happen, the partnership between eBay and PayPal has already proved to be worth it.

Top 10 technology marriages made in heaven

Relationships that have blessed the IT industry

2. Apple/NeXT
Shaun Nichols: This deal yielded Apple a nice upgrade for its software business, but more importantly, it brought a very important executive back into its fold.

In the late 1990s, Apple found itself in need of an operating system. The Mac OS platform had been poorly maintained over the years and parts of it were more than a decade old. Eventually the company decided to do a complete rebuild of the platform.

To help speed up the process, Apple purchased a smaller software developer and used its products as the base for the new Macintosh Operating System. The BeOS operating system was considered, but reconciliation won out.

Eventually Aple decided on NeXT, a Unix-based developer that created high-end workstation and server systems for enterprise and academic markets. Along with the company and its operating system came NeXT chief executive Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder who had been forced out of the company roughly a decade earlier.

From there, history was made. Jobs took over as chief executive and under his direction Apple has grown to become one of the biggest brands on the planet.

Iain Thomson: After Apple's bitter divorce with Steve Jobs, the marriage with NeXT was needed on both sides, and my goodness has it paid dividends.

Apple was, quite frankly, foundering without Jobs at the helm. Bitter infighting had crippled the company and the malaise was reaching the point where serious voices in the industry were suggesting the company wind itself up.

Meanwhile Jobs was building a company around his vision of what computers should be. The end result was something virtually unsellable, along the lines of the Lisa, because Jobs set the standard too high. NeXT boxes were never going to sell on their own, but the operating system was pure gold.

The two got together and the rest is history. The new operating system was rightly hailed as a revolution in the company, and won many admirers. Steve Jobs won back the company that he felt was his, and found buyers who would pay the premium for a fantastic operating system in a pretty, if expensive, wrapper. The two were made for each other.

1. Microsoft/Intel
Iain Thomson: The relationship between Intel and Microsoft is a complex one, and rife with rumour. But together the two companies built a relationship that influenced the whole course of the PC revolution.

Nothing was ever official about this relationship, but enough people recognised the effects in the industry to spawn the term Wintel. Intel and Microsoft worked closely together in the early years to make sure that they both used each other to maximum effect. In doing so both benefited; Intel from selling more processors, Microsoft from having a guaranteed platform to sell its software.

The more cynical among us saw a perfect circle. Intel would come out with faster and faster processors, and Microsoft would build a bloatware operating system to use up all that extra capacity. Some of the tinfoil hat brigade saw this as a conspiracy, but it was innovation in action - developers build for the best platform and wait for the laggards to catch up.

Neither Microsoft nor Intel has the power they once had, but the relationship is still close. It probably will be as long as both companies exist.

Shaun Nichols: For the better part of three decades it was the perfect racket. Intel produced the processors, Microsoft produced the software, and an assortment of PC builders were left to do the dirty work and battle it out in the low-margin retail space.

At one point, it seemed that pretty much every computer on the planet not made by Apple had two stickers affixed to the front of its case: ‘Intel Inside' and ‘Designed for Windows' (OK, there were also some AMD stickers as well but they were few and far between).

While there is plenty to dislike about some of the products and practices displayed by each company, one has to admit that the explosion in personal computing and the internet over the last two decades has been made smoother by the presence of a steady, consistent platform created by the foundation of x86 processors and the Windows operating system.