It happens like clockwork, and often the subject is Apple: a company has a great earnings report and is sitting on a ton of cash, and analysts and pundits start dreaming up names of smaller companies who the flush company could acquire. At about this time in 2008, Apple was going to buy Adobe. Earlier that year, Apple was going to buy Yahoo. Indeed, there's a pretty straightforward way, depicted above, to get a sense of the number of names that have been floated as likely Apple purchases—just ask Google autocomplete.

Fabless chipmaker ARM is the latest post-earnings target of buyout speculation, and whoever planted the rumor in the press has no doubt cashed out already after having driven the stock price up today. The instantly popular theory goes that Apple would buy ARM in order to keep anyone else from using ARM products, so that it could have the low-power architecture all to itself. Apple could certainly afford it—ARM's market cap is a relatively small $8 billion, and Apple is sitting on almost $42 billion in cash.

The Apple/ARM rumor is being widely debunked, and rightly so, with any number of solid reasons given for why this won't happen. But one point that I have yet to see raised is that the proposed "buy it, then cut off the competition" scenario seems fairly impossible to execute, even if Apple were so inclined.

All of the big and medium-sized players who want ARM licenses already have them. If Apple bought ARM, they could refuse to grant new licenses, but they couldn't just magically revoke all of the existing licenses. Samsung, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, TI, and everyone else in the ARM ecosystem all have ARM-based roadmaps that go out for many years, and all of the products on those roadmaps are based on licenses that Apple can't just unilaterally invalidate. So if Apple did buy ARM, we'd still see a healthy stream of non-Apple ARM products coming to market over the next five years. And while the massive ARM ecosystem pipeline empties out, chipmakers would have plenty of time to switch to an alternative low-power architecture like the venerable and still-popular MIPS.

The only company that I could imagine buying ARM right now is Intel, but even given Intel's recent statements that it's looking to spend some cash to buy its way into mobiles, this is still unlikely. Intel is still in antitrust hot water in the x86 market, and any Intel/ARM purchase would invite immediate and careful scrutiny from regulators. And then there's the fact that Intel was already in the ARM business not long ago with the XScale line, but the chipmaker exited it to focus on moving x86 into low-power applications. It's doubtful that Intel has already given up and is going back to ARM.

In the end, the most likely acquirer for ARM is nobody. ARM licenses are relatively cheap, which is why they're so ubiquitous, and which is also why ARM's market cap and revenues are so tiny despite that ubiquity. Given how widely licensed ARM cores are, the fact that a strategic acquirer can't just revoke everyone's license and nuke the entire ecosystem's product pipeline, and the small size of ARM's business, it's just not a very attractive takeover target from either a strategic or revenue standpoint. That isn't to say that no one will ever buy ARM—some group of people somewhere could decide that it makes sense for their business—but the point is that there's no obvious reason for it to be a target.