So I heard that some think that is because for a long while the R/D effort was outsourced to other companies, away from larger ones. I dunno if that is the case but in the company I worked for got acquired and did some pretty serious R/D. It could have been profitable but acquisition was obviously the easier way out so the investors took it.

I'm sure something like Twitter is useful but only to a large company, perhaps? I dunno.

That's not really it, if we're going to speak in generalizations it would be more fitting to talk about the investors that favor high risk/high reward growth patterns.