There is a hidden principle-agent problem where the original company's intent gets distorted to align with broader corporate objectives.

The total market the acquired company could have penetrated never gets developed and fundamentally they decide to take an exit now for less risk and more cash early for what could have been a stronger contribution for the economy on the whole via a well-exploited niche.

A mundane example would be how the developers behind Firewatch were acqui-hired by Valve. They had a well-developed following and a hotly anticipated second product, an original single-player IP, somewhat rare nowadays. Half the team dissolved to work on Steam and the rest funneled themselves into Half-Life: Alyx. The new game was delisted from development.

No this is not quite it.

These acquisitions are not 'big bangs' like VC investments where one will make the bank.

They are large and small investments across the board - some for know-how, some for talent, some for product, some for brand (ie Beats), some for code etc..

An acquisition is expensive beyond the price tag, especially in terms of opportunity cost if you bet on the buy and it fails.

Maybe... Google seems to be taking that strategy but it feels like it leads to some kind of flaw in their thinking around product support.

How long has it been since Google had a notable successful acquisition? I'm asking because I can't think of anything recent.

In 2014 Firebase, Stackdriver and DeepMind (who then made AlphaGo). There's also Waze from 2013. The only thing I could call out after that is Kaggle in 2017. Maybe they will make something out of this year's Fitbit acquisition, but that's a bit early to tell.

I guess I wasn’t thinking about acquisitions so much as “you only need one success”. They throw a lot out there I guess hoping some of them will pay off, but it leaves them coming off as scattered to the outside.

It usually takes a while for an acquisition to be labeled a success, right?