Microsoft was established in 1975 and it went public in 1986 [in about 11 years]

Microsoft’s first acquisition was in 1987 and it has purchased an average of six companies a year.

Microsoft has made eight acquisitions worth over one billion dollars: Skype (2011), aQuantive (2007), Fast Search & Transfer (2008), Navision (2002), Visio Corporation (2000), Yammer (2012), Nokia (2013) and Mojang (2014).

Let us dig into the List of mergers and acquisitions by Microsoft data

Data: We grabbed the above wikipedia table and loaded into infocaptor for further analysis

For lot of the deals there are no publised figures on how much Microsoft spent to acquire the target company so we also reached out to SEC.gov data for financial information to get the acquisition dollars spent.

Here is a top list of business categories that Microsoft has spent in acquisitions

If we look into the SEC data for Microsoft and other tech companies, Microsoft spends the most in Research and Development from [by dollar]

Which countries has Microsoft spent the most on acquisitions

Observations: After United States, Luxembourg, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway are the countries where Microsoft has spent the most in acquisitions

What are the favorite spots for Microsoft to go shopping

Observations : Microsoft likes to go to Canada, Israel, UK, France and Germany frequently but for smaller acquisitions.

Here is the whole picture, number of acquisitions over the years

Check out the details of each and every acquisition made by Microsoft in this interactive application