This "trend" is started much earlier, when mostly media and entertainment companies started buying "tech" companies. They were under they illusion that they didn't need to foster technology but were just buying a commodity, and subsequently all further development came to a grinding halt and the engineers fled.

Is this new wave of buy-ins fundamentally different or is Staples an outlier?

The main potential difference I see is that unlike media giants, many of these companies have continuous product development at their core, albeit in wildly different forms.

Also, such attempts at integrating start-ups have often failed for companies that are actually in the same business (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). I don't see the odds of this being a fruitful strategy being very good.