Microsoft just picked up Danger, inventor of the Sidekick mobile device and overall very clever mobile company founded by Andy Rubin who is now working for Google on Android and Open Handset Alliance stuff.

Om Malik is quoting the price as 500MM after what his reasearch showed was 225MM in past injections of capital.   

Although at first glance everybody thinks these deals make huge money for everybody associated with them, this is not the case.   As we’ve noted before average VC deals  *lose money*, and more importantly you always need to factor time into these equations to make sense of the profitability of a deal.

In this Danger sale people made out well, but depending on when the big money was invested it’s not clear anybody had a spectacular return here unless the big money came in very recently (I don’t know if it did or not).

Why would MS want this company?   As with the Yahoo aquistion and as MS has done for so long, they are trying to gain a huge foothold in key markets by buying up a key company in the space.    I’m expecting some competition for the Google/Dell phone to be announced soon.