Waze needs to worry about being too greedy. If all they made was $1M, then a 400% increase sounds fantastic to me and should be enough for several people to live on for the rest of their lives. I don't imagine they have too many employees.

Check your math, 400% of 1 million is 4 million :\

You're right, change the 400% to 400X and it works.

It's the other way around. Apple has more cash than anyone else on the planet. They can afford to pay 750 mil (they can sure negotiate if they want). Waze has the upper hand in this as so many users (I love the time it has saved me) but Apple has a serious problem that needs to be corrected YESTERDAY. Sure Apple can do this on their own but see where it has gotten them??
With Waze they can get a head start in revamping their image (and $750m is a cheap way for them to do this quickly) and get 40m in loyal users. Plus waze is pretty unique in crowd sourced navigation compared to google or mapquest.

Imagine if Google picked up Waze - what would Apple do??

Pay the 750m and get moving along. Apple makes this profit in 2 weeks.

Apple keeps sitting on its fat cash hoard and it's doing absolutely nothing at all for the company. Unless Apple has some huge spending plans for the future, I really don't understand why the company is such a tightwad with cash. Wall Street hates Apple for its enormous cash hoard and is constantly downgrading the stock and saying that the cash hoard is just a useless drag on the stock. Amazon spends money like crazy for acquisitions and the share price climbs and climbs along with the P/E. Apple's cash hoard is doing absolutely nothing for shareholders, so Apple might as well spend some of it to improve the mapping software. Apple is making more money than ever and yet the share price continues to lag. Spend the damn cash to buy Waze and hope for the best. Nothing else seems to be working out for Apple.

And yet a novelty service company called Instagram sold for $1 billion.

Originally Posted by iphonerulez

Apple keeps sitting on its fat cash hoard and it's doing absolutely nothing at all for the company.

You haven't been paying attention at all.

They bought a bunch of mapping services (but not enough, and they didn't spend enough at integrating them).

They were able to put forth BILLIONS of dollars after the huge earthquake, basically paying cash for their suppliers to rebuild their factories.

Whenever a new iToy/Mac requires new processes, Apple has the cash lying around to develop them and just buy the machinery needed to manufacture (as with the CNC machined unibody computers, where Apple just bought the machines, since nobody had anywhere near the capacity to produce in the numbers Apple needed.

I think there are about 50 employees working for Waze in Isreal where the software originated. 10 more employees in California. I use Waze because that's the best one so far for turn-by-turn "free" app. Google Map's turn-by-turn type font is too small to read. Apple's Map doesn't talk on my iPhone 4. MotionX is good but you have to pay for voice after 30 days. I like also how Waze indicates Dunkin Donuts (my go to coffee) locations around you.

Originally Posted by Grendelmon

And yet a novelty service company called Instagram sold for $1 billion.

It's about snapchat now.

Buy Waze for a bunch of money -> Waze owners leave filthy rich -> Apple gets? This doesn't make sense to me... They can buy the company, but it seems like they need the talent. I can't pretend to know how these things work, but if you offered me hundreds of millions of dollars, I would walk out the door the next day, buy a small island somewhere, and drink a lot of margaritas on a daily basis. It seems to me that they need the talent of the creators of Waze, which are probably the owner(s?).