Either that, or most of the companies know that the technologies they are building are likely to be acquired to build part of the feature set of a larger offering, and are building them for precisely that reason. Too cynical?
Why is that cynical? That seems like a very reasonable thing to do if you want to start a company with very narrow domain knowledge.
I know a person that built a company for acquisition like you mention. Don't think they were ever successful. To be an acquisition target is one thing. But to be acquired by companies like Google most people would have to meet their hiring bar (aka passing their interviews) and have the right composition for the team (mostly engineers they would have a hard time hiring away). Of course there are exceptions, like they're solely purchasing for the technology, but that means the tech they built was pretty good and couldn't easily be cloned (of course this excludes if they're buying for market share of users if the product is super popular). My opinion is incredibly risky building for acquisition. Anyone have examples that it isn't?