[rootlocus]

You're right. I'm positive that every time a large company acquires a small one, it's because of their community and IP. Code is easily rewritten, and startups aren't making breakthroughs in algorithms. It's not like microsoft didn't have engineers capable of making a minecraft clone. They didn't have the rights to do so.

[andrepd]

Exactly. Obviously MS didn't pay 2.5bil for a messy Java codebase. They paid for the brand, the IP, and the fanbase.