What I find a bit crazy is why don't large corporations do this more often? I literally told my manager when I worked at Corel that we should do this: Find a promising looking startup, clone their offering and blow them out of the water by virtue of the fact that we have 500 sales and marketing people with 20 years of experience (not to mention by being second to the market we can learn how to avoid all the legacy problems the startup endured). We were in a "new ventures" team and I figured instead of going along with cockamamie schemes dreamed up by our PGMs that had virtually no hope of success, we should enter markets that had at least some advance proven success. Nope. Not going to happen. We needed to build something that nobody had ever thought of before. While I can understand the idea, I still think its a massive mistake for an established company. Why enter markets where you can't play to your strengths (muscle)? I never could figure it out...