[Arainach]

Starting with an acquisition is a cheap way of accelerating once your company reaches a certain size.

Look at Microsoft - Powerpoint was an acquisition. They bought most of the team that designed and built Windows NT from DEC. Frontpage was an acquisition, Azure came after AWS and was led by a series of people brought in in acquisitions (Ray Ozzie, Mark Russinovich, etc.). It's how things happen when you're that big.

[kelnos]

I think it's a little unfair to give DEC credit for NT. Sure, they may have bought the team, but they did most (all?) of the work on NT at Microsoft.

That's not like Google buying Android when they already had a functioning (albeit not at all polished) smartphone OS.