Do they really need Labs now? Google has grown to a size where they can easily acquire promising young start-ups out in the wild. One advantage of having Labs

Do they really need Labs now? Google has grown to a size where they can easily acquire promising young start-ups out in the wild. One advantage of having Labs back in the day was that projects could have the backing of Google's infrastructure. Now, with cloud services like AWS, the bar is set low enough that anyone has access to this kind of stuff. How hard is it to start a YouTube in this day and age?