Real Motive Behind ARM Keil acquisition may be a entry point in MCU market. They have targetted MCU market by their recent introduction of ARM Cortex-M3 core which they claim to be a good alternative to 8/16 bit MCU.

http://www.arm.com/news/6750.html

http://www.arm.com/products/....html

Please see their emph on embedded device & applications and its market share ($2.2bn)

Keil Acquisition give them exposure to large Embedded/MCU user data base at such a low cost.

Already keil 100,000 customer plus forum like www.8052.com user might have started looking at ARM data sheets.

But whether they succeed in that is remains to be seen because MCU & particurly 8051 community is a unique & dedicated one. Only raw CPU power in not enough to win the game. Previously also many 16/32 bit MCU(80196 , AVR series ,some ST & motorola 32 bit core) failed to shackle 8051 base. Long Live 8051

May be 8051 story is like x86 processor - may be not better then many contemporary CPU but many things/combinations (like its good & vast code/software base , backward/forw compat., Microsoft etc) worked in its favor & kept it in the race (and winnner).
with so huge base of code , software & devices developed around it over the years , dediacted base of developers who has got years of experience with all sort of apsect of 8051 devices it will be very difficult for any tom , dick & harry to replace 8051