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ZDNet's Jason Hiner suggests "Seven big tech acquisitions to watch for in 2009," and each of them looks highly plausible (Oracle to buy Salesforce.com? You bet), though I think a few are mismatched.
First off, Hiner points to a tie-up between EMC and Dell. That feels about right, except that I have heard that ink is still being spilled over a Cisco acquisition of EMC.
Of course, with how active Cisco has been lately on the acquisition front, it's now far too easy to assume Cisco will buy just about everyone. Even so, I think Cisco is a more likely suitor for Red Hat's hand than IBM, which is Hiner's guess. As part of Cisco's grand design to do...just about everything, it's going to want more expertise in the underlying operating system powering it all: Linux.
Such a move would arguably make a big impact on the enterprise computing space, whereas Hiner's assumption that "Microsoft needs to make a bold move in the mobile space" (true) and hence will buy Palm, almost made me break into uncontrollable laughter. Palm? A bold move? Sure, a decade ago.
Hiner calls out some cogent arguments for Microsoft acquiring Palm's technology, but neither Palm nor Microsoft really has a mobile technology problem: they have marketing problems, and a marriage of equal (duds) isn't going to change that.
The merger on Hiner's list I'd like to see most? Apple buying Adobe. Both companies make beautiful products. It would be awesome to see what they could build together.
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