Simply Business, a business insurance provider in the UK, has aggregated the acquisition histories of the Big Five tech companies into a handy interactive infographic.
The graphic takes a look at the five year acquisitive streaks of Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo and Facebook, and reveals some very interesting comparisons - especially related to the comparative size of the WhatsApp deal by Facebook.
Deals with undisclosed terms are also included on the timelines, which gives less of a sense of scale and more of a feel of particular deal clusters. Also of interest is the ability to filter by category of company acquired, which offers a view into how each company is strategically deploying capital - such as Google's continued hunger for all things hardware.
Overall, social, mobile and hardware companies are much more likely targets for purchase by the Big Five, underscoring how these trends are playing out compared with previous trends of media and advertising acquisitions.
For the fully interactive version, with the ability to lengthen the scale to see more granular data, click here.
NB: Battlefield image courtesy Shutterstock.