I completely agree with your synopsis that NUAN will likely not be bought out; though I do not agree with all your reasoning.
Access to NUAN customers is one reason companies would like to purchase NUAN, lest it be corporate or consumer customers...Agree, IBM is probably the best fit, from both their healthcare presence and as an integrator, etc. If we consider where Dragon Go is going, it will be a competitor to SIRI….as well as to all the search companies, Google, MSF, Yahoo or Ask…. So to keep searches going in their direction, or add to it, any of the search companies would find Nuance a great purchase. Yahoo could make a major jump back in competing with Google and MSFT by purchasing Nuance…..All of these players also have an interest in healthcare, and as they already have their own software, and software is software……It is right in their ballpark….In fact, Oracle would be another one…..
I believe it might be more of a business model issue as to why they may not be for sale, at least not yet with all the potential. The big players who control Nuance, WP, know what they have, and are not about to sell out for the normal 60% buyout premium…. I also think in order to gain market share and have some of the big guys use them, like Google, MSFT, or Apple, they might have take instituted some contractual measures to assure these clients they would not fall into the hands of a competitor so all would feel comfortable to use Nuance….So it was a growth issue, and a way to become the VR defacto standard, not from picking sides…..
My proof of why the buyout is likely not going to happen, at least not at these prices, is the big name players, like Google, Apple, MSFT, Oracle, IBM,. They have had plenty of cash sitting on the sidelines and plenty of vision – they know where things are going. Why wouldn’t they have purchased Nuance just a few years back in the giant meld down when Nuance was 6? Why wait…So if it was going to happen from them, good chance it would have already happened. Now that Nuance about to become more and more profitable, and generate plenty of cash the smaller players could consider a run….
What is the interface between man and machine worth…..Google at this point, and maybe MSFT are the only other companies prepared at this point to have a piece of it….
And on the value of Nuance, people should ask themselves why are Google and MSFT there? Us longs know why….. And we know that at this point, Nuance is way ahead of those guys…and that is saying something to be beating those guys…..the only concern I have is those guys can afford to give VR away to keep what they already have, and plenty of cash to do it…which goes back that model of playing with all……Dragon GO is a good example of that…..partnering with best in class people…..they all gain some leverage vs. having to rely on the existing search engines….isn’t competition wonderful!
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Originally Posted by
Quintious 
Loaded up on the completely unnecessary beatdown it took after earnings. Filling the gap nicely.
On the subject of buyout rumors, those rumors have been circling ever since I started investing in this company. However, the more I learned about it, the more I've come to the conclusion that it will likely never happen, and speculators thinking a short-term buyout will happen are pinning their hopes on the wrong thing. Fact is, there are too many components to this company to create a natural partner for a buyout. Everybody knows Siri, and everybody knows their speech-to-text technology...but not many people are aware that most of their money comes from other things - they have the market cornered on directory assistance technology (you call customer support at some place where the computer says "Please tell me what you're calling about" and then directs you to the right department. They've got a whole division devoted to optical character recognition and medical transcription technology. Their HT9 technology is what powers most text messages in the world, and what text messages don't use that use Swype, which is also theirs. They've got an Acrobat alternative (which, frankly, I find more robust than Acrobat...). They've got an imaging division in there. There are just a lot of moving parts.
The problem this presents from a buyout perspective is....what company would want to take on all of those parts? Apple isn't going to care about the medical or OCR wings, and neither will Google or Microsoft or HTC. Adobe won't care about the mobile aspect of the company. Xerox would only be interested in the imaging platform, and they wouldn't be buyers because A) the company used to belong to Xerox in the first place and they let it go and B) the company is worth almost as much as Xerox these days. On and on the list goes, and Nuance obviously isn't going to start selling pieces of itself, because they're all profitable and they've been very aggressive in buying out competition, not selling to them. The only company that even somewhat fits is IBM - and they've made a practice of selling Nuance their copyrights. The premium someone would have to pay (+50%) to buy out the company JUST to acquire their mobile division is not something the major players are going to do, especially when they can just do like Apple is doing with SIri and lease the technology from them.
