3 ms·

One reason is that google acquires to squash competition rather than always to obtain their talent for anything else

• bko 4y ago
  Do you mean competition in terms of employees (hire so they don't work elsewhere) or companies? The employee thing is silly IMO. It's just a losing game and the number of engineers is very high. And the hard part of creating a killer app isn't necessarily the engineering requirements. Sure some hard problems require a few dozen people out of maybe a few thousand, but most killer apps are relatively simple CRUD apps that require relatively basic engineering. Finding product market fit is the hardest part and that's not necessarily an engineering problem. There will always be people that want to leave FAANG for other opportunities even taking a huge paycut. And most apps don't require tens of thousands of engineers to create. In terms of acquiring successful products, maybe. I do think its weird when companies pay big money to buy a user base of a few hundred k to millions and shut it down. An example is Twitter buying Vine, but that didn't prevent TikTok from being invented. But there are counter examples of course like Meta buying WhatsApp and Instagram. Maybe FAANG does do that but its a bad strategy and is wasteful
• yborg 4y ago
  This is true of all the tech whales, it's actually smart business in a climate where antitrust enforcement doesn't exist. Paying a few million dollars a year for a team of engineers to do nothing for a few years to eliminate a startup that could have carved a couple of hundred million dollars a year out of Google's top line is actually a great return on investment.