Would agree in large part. I think the ones that were successful, they're successful enough that you forget it was an acquisition.
One off the top my head is Google Docs[1] which, for the longest time, I was pretty sure it was in-house tech. It's actually a number of acquisitions for the collaborative editor tech and then MS Office support.
It seems now that most incumbents have enough cash to not care about being that strategic about acquisitions.
The "used to" is a long long time ago. Before FAANG there was, for example Intel, Microsoft and Cisco, and they were very happy to vacuum up companies instead of holding a big r&d bag. Cisco got to be very good at it, in particular. And of course this is very much standard practice in pharma drug discovery.
I think the Golden Age of internal R&D was probably 1960-1980 at Bell Labs, IBM and the really large engineering cos like Boeing?
One off the top my head is Google Docs[1] which, for the longest time, I was pretty sure it was in-house tech. It's actually a number of acquisitions for the collaborative editor tech and then MS Office support.
It seems now that most incumbents have enough cash to not care about being that strategic about acquisitions.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs#History