alt Hacker NewsMy point on the acquisitions was that a surprising amount of their successful software was not made in house. Again, I don't mean it as a knock against them, necessarily.
AI is an odd example. For one, a lot of the research there is from acquisitions. Somewhat feeding back to my first point. They also were seen as tripping up on a lot of the current AI race, no?
> My point on the acquisitions was that a surprising amount of their successful software was not made in house.
First, that's just not true. Their biggest products by revenue (search/adwords) and biggest stock value driver (AI/Gemini/Datacenters) are clearly in-house creations.
But even then, the two biggest "acquisitions" you're probably thinking of are YouTube and Android, acquired in 2006 and 2005 respectively. What fraction of the software base of those products do you think has survived the intervening two decades? To be blunt: most of the software being shipped out of those groups is being authored by engineers who couldn't even read when the ancestral code existed outside of Google.
Honestly the "acquisition" thing is just a cope meme promulgated by Apple stans, as it were. It's not a serious point.