EA, Netflix, and Adobe I can see as plausible but the other ones not even. EA for games, Netflix for streaming, and Adobe for its technology. What possible reason would Apple need to own Disney for?
Netflix makes as much sense as any high-profile app. Buying facebook, e.g., just to integrate Ping into it would be a huge price and given facebook's nascent monetization model, dilute Apple, Inc's profit margin by a bunch. And buying other things which are mostly running today on Windows like Adobe's programs (and how to handle Flash) just seems difficult to integrate into the culture of the ecosystem.
If you want something out of left field, but newsworthy, why not a camera company which poses few integration problems and offers expansion opportunities for places to put iOS. Someone like Nikon or Olympus which also have a tradition of premium products and being able to market their own standards, e.g., lens mounts. So not a phone or media player that's also a camera, but cameras which are also media players, internet browsers and app runners (with cool new imaging apps that can run right inside the cameras), and maybe, gasp, even phones. (And "FaceTime HD!)
The most likely route, though, is acquisition of small to medium-sized companies which Apple can either easily absorb or simply take their best technologies and most of the talent behind 'em. With technologies to improve or extend the whole tightly-bound, synergistic broad digital platform Apple is building. The CPU in the iPad/iPhone is working out very well, e.g., and significant features in iTunes and other programs have also been worthwhile.
Other acquisitions will focus on products/programs/services which can yield ever-diversifying sources of incremental revenue in relatively short order. It's breath-taking to see that non-that-long-ago ailing Apple Computer is now the world's largest Music retailer, most influential specialty brick and mortar (and glass) retailer, more recently an increasingly important vendor of mobile software programs (in a big way), and vendor and renter of television programs, movies and books. Including a growing stable of vanity physical photo books published by Apple themselves. And soon, the Mac App Store (along with Apple's own Mac apps. Games might fit the bill here, but it would be a new core competency to master and integrate. Backup services (like Carbonite)? A company like Squarespace.com (to move iWeb's previous function directly into the cloud)?
And, no Sony, either. Not even Toyota! Or an aluminum mine - though you can't take component suppliers off the table either.
products.
