[flir]

It's the outsourcing of R&D. Behemoths used to have huge R&D budgets, now they let the market decide and harvest the successful solutions.

It's a market efficiency, I guess, otherwise they'd stick with the R&D approach.

[kjellsbells]

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?

[flir]

Bell is what I was thinking of, too.