> On what are you basing your opinion that this is a "great deal"? Google is going to have to earn close to $100B in profit attributable to this acquisition over the next 10 years in order to financially justify it.
Maybe like the Motorola acquisition - not so much the profit attributle from the acquisition but the profit they *won't* lose by not acquiring them.
That $100B is a based on a ballpark estimate of how much a passive investor would expect to earn by putting $32B of their money into a high-yield stock fund (yielding 15% per year, which is a conservative annual growth rate for a cloud provider) and sitting on it for 10 years. If Google can't do at least as well as that, the investor would be better off with the stock fund.
Maybe like the Motorola acquisition - not so much the profit attributle from the acquisition but the profit they *won't* lose by not acquiring them.