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Google Maps, Google Earth, Youtube, Android - all acquisitions.

• flir 4y ago
  It's the outsourcing of R&D. Behemoths used to have huge R&D budgets, now they let the market decide and harvest the successful solutions. It's a market efficiency, I guess, otherwise they'd stick with the R&D approach.
  • kjellsbells 4y ago
    The "used to" is a long long time ago. Before FAANG there was, for example Intel, Microsoft and Cisco, and they were very happy to vacuum up companies instead of holding a big r&d bag. Cisco got to be very good at it, in particular. And of course this is very much standard practice in pharma drug discovery. I think the Golden Age of internal R&D was probably 1960-1980 at Bell Labs, IBM and the really large engineering cos like Boeing?
    • flir 4y ago
      Bell is what I was thinking of, too.