The real value of buying a technology company is the talent that comes with it. Sure, the technology is good, but you will need to continue innovating or else t

The real value of buying a technology company is the talent that comes with it. Sure, the technology is good, but you will need to continue innovating or else the technology will become obsolete. For that you need the talent. In company acquisitions what many times happens is that the talent just runs away which sort of defeats the whole point of buying the company (unless you just care about patents). Because of the risk of loosing the talent I don't think buying Bing is such a good idea, especially since it will cost billions. I wonder if it would be better for companies like Apple/Facebook to just develop their own search engines themselves. In fact, I would be surprised if Apple doesn't have some people working on something like that, even if just for R&D and it never goes anywhere. I know I would have a couple of smart people working on it.