[crystalis]

On some level, yes, but companies don't magic employees into existence. It doesn't matter too much if the Go language comes out of Dogpile or Pets.com instead of Google, does it?

I can definitely see that Google is more likely to foment transformation than a Yahoo, but I think it's a lot harder to say that we're better off with fewer acquisitions. It seems like the only good metric is number of good employees at good companies, and it doesn't matter much if it's Google or a company that decided not to get acquired by Google. (Although I don't think it'd be that great if Google were the only 'good company' in this hand wavy metric.)