ARM's $31 billion takeover shows that information is king

ARM Holdings, a chip design firm that doesn’t manufacture or sell any chips, has just been bought by SoftBank for a cool $31.4 billion. That’s four times as much as Microsoft paid for Nokia, close to three times Google’s expenditure on Motorola, and an order of magnitude more than Palm cost HP. We think of these other companies as the authors of the mobile world we’re living in, but it’s ARM’s invisible contribution that has proven more influential — and