In January, Microsoft made a takeover bid of nearly 66 billion euros for game publisher Activision Blizzard. If the deal actually goes through, it will be completed by June 2023, making it the largest deal in the game industry ever. MASTERS dives into history and highlights the five biggest tech deals in a row. Text: Fleur de Jong

1. EMC acquisition by Dell

In 2016, Dell paid a whopping 64 billion euros to acquire storage giant EMC. The increase in scale allowed Dell to increase its pace of investment and compete with companies such as HP Inc. Whereas Dell was especially big in the small- and medium-sized business market, EMC dominated the large business market.

2. SDL acquisition by JDS Uniphase. 

To meet the rapidly growing demand for fiber optics, network company JDS Uniphase acquired rival fiber optic component manufacturer SDL Inc. in the year 2000 for about 35 billion euros.

3. Acquisition of Red Hat by IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or too IBM is a company best known to the general public for the first IBM Personal Computer. IBM's core businesses include designing and selling computer hardware, software, technology and services in the IT sector. In 2019, the company acquired Red Hat for about 32 billion euros.

4. Slack acquisition by Salesforce  

The two parties had been in negotiations since 2020, with the final acquisition recently taking place in 2021. With the acquisition, Salesforce wanted to integrate Slack into its existing Customer 360 platform. The integration between the two tools should start helping companies with the new way of working that emerged after the pandemic. The so-called digital headquarters should connect customers, employees and partners digitally. Salesforce paid about 23 billion euros for the acquisition.

 5. LinkedIn acquisition by Microsoft

In 2016, this was Microsoft's biggest deal ever; they bought LinkedIn for about 23.2 billion euros. It gave Microsoft a chance to grow the professional networking site and integrate it into Microsoft's enterprise software, such as Office 356. Since LinkedIn's inception, they collected 433 million users, so Microsoft pocketed 57 euros per registered user. Also read: 'Dress from The Wizard of Oz should fetch mega amount'