5 Companies Microsoft Should Buy

With its recent purchase of Koral, an online content-management company, Salesforce is positioned to step easily into project and contract management and even Web conferencing, areas that Microsoft is hoping to claim with its Sharepoint. Why not buy your competitor before it is your competitor?

Salesforce's board would, of course, fight the move tooth, nail and poison pill. But the right offer might be as hard to resist as Rupert Murdoch's bid for Dow Jones .

4. Intuit(INTU Quote)
Market value: $9.6 billion
Price-to-sales value: 4.0
Price-to-book value: 5.3

A purchase of Intuit would provide Microsoft with instant credibility among the many small businesses that use QuickBooks and would turn Microsoft Money -- which, aside from Hotmail, is the most useful thing Microsoft has to offer on the Internet -- into a robust personal finance site.

The idea is far from new: The notion of buying Intuit is ... oh, only 13 years old. It never happened because of monopoly concerns, But both companies are different beasts today, having evolved to remain complementary to each other while less threatening to rivals.

Intuit, for example, has branched into on-demand banking solutions, which could give Microsoft a footing in an area of software that is important to its future plans.

5. Adobe(ADBE Quote)
Market value: $23.9 billion
Price-to-sales value: 9.4
Price-to-book value: 4.7

OK, this would deplete nearly all of Microsoft's stash of cash, but it could also provide the company with its last best shot of controlling something close to an Internet platform.

Adobe's Flash Player, long optimized for the Microsoft platform, has become as ubiquitous as it is brandless -- it powers everything from higher-bandwidth ads to videos on Google's(GOOG Quote) YouTube and many other video sites.

Overnight, Microsoft would be a big player in both. Flash is on 97% of desktops -- even larger than Windows' market share. But Adobe's Flash Cast and Flash Home promise to extend its reach to mobile devices. Acrobat, as popular in email attachments as Excel and Word, could be integrated into the Office suite. And Photoshop would help Microsoft match Apple's(AAPL Quote) new Aperture software.