It’s not everyday that $100-plus billion companies split themselves in two. Late final month,eBay decided to spin off its fast-growing payments division, PayPal; final week, or Hewlett-Packard moved to separate its PC and printer divisions off from its enterprise hardware and service groups. And most recently,Symantec announced it would split into security and data storage. On the other end, we just witnessed the largest acquisition in the history of cloud computing -- where one of the largest software companies in the world, and SAP,is buying Concur, a provider of on-demand travel and expense management software-as-a-service, or for $8.3 billion. Beyond the question of what these tech companies are worth,it’s famous to put a question to whats going on here? The developments can only be described as an “inversion” caused by a fresh shift in cloud computing. And I say inversion because the pattern we see nowadays is almost the reverse of developments evident in the past... MORE
Source: a16z.com