No mega company really has to have internal innovation. And I doubt the pretend internal startups ala skunkswork with an unlimited budget and extensive runways are a real replacement for innovation popping out of the marketplace among the bodies of a hundred other failed/acquihired startups.
Firebase (acquired in 2014) seems to qualify as semi-recent given it's become a massive product line in a few years.
It adds value to their cloud, is responsive to actual customer desires, and generally seems like a bargain at the right stage (a Google-supported tool being more valuable than a third-party GCP tool, even with Google's questionable dedication to longevity).
Just don't make the IBM / MS mistake and think adding more PMs to previously successful company is a good idea.
There are an almost unlimited number of things to do with money. Even if you have lots of money, the number of good opportunities exceeds the amount of cash. It doesn't even have to be high-risk acquisitions - Just anything that will get a good return.
With all of the failed and failing products from Google acquisitions, is that really a great idea?
Because it's inefficient. Google could buy a thousand biotech startups that are all doing innovative work trying to cure cancer and things like that, but that work has nothing to do with search engines or data centers, so it makes no sense to put it under the same roof. The same management staff isn't going to be effective in managing both types of business, all it's going to do is split their focus.
But give the money to the shareholders and the ones who want to can use it to invest in biotech, others can invest in electric cars or new types of power generation or energy storage or space exploration or whatever else.
Using the profits from search engines to fund cancer research and space exploration is great. Running those businesses inside the search engine company is pointless.
Yet it has a lot to do with Calico, another Alphabet company.
What if I want to invest in Calico but not Google, or vice versa? All it's doing is making the market less efficient.
Only they can't do it that way, because if you buy a share of Alphabet, basically the entire value is from Google and even if one of the little left-field bets triples in value it would have only marginal impact on the overall share price.
Meanwhile if you did want to do such a thing, the better solution would be to have a fund with the sole purpose of investing in high-risk biotech startups, and then invest in a slew of them to better diversify the risk. Then let retail investors buy shares in that entity, which is all biotech instead of being a tiny sliver of biotech but really mostly Google.
I'm reacting to the "even distribution" notion not taxing in general. I think there are legitimate reasons for government to collect taxes but ensuring even distribution of wealth isn't one of them, IMHO.
You're making a value judgement that it's worse to distribute some tax dollars than to turn a blind eye to poverty.
It's both.
You don't tax people and then provide everyone with a free dog, you just let people keep their money and they'll use it to get a dog if they want one.
If you want to help the poor, you don't give them bureaucratic programs that require them to buy specific amounts and types of food, housing and education, you just give them the money and they can figure out what they need better than you. In that case some of the money came from different people than it went to, but it's still the same principle.
Alternatively they fall prey to lotteries, casinos, drugs, alcohol, or any other number of things and you're right back at square one... give them more money.
It's a blackhole feel-good policy that ignores reality. It's better to put strong social safety nets in place. Buy the food and the clothes for them, maybe even establish a discretionary stippend. But don't just say to people here's 20K ... Good luck! Most people don't have a concept of budgeting... It's not going to work.
This is contrary to evidence. There are people who are poor and there are people who are addicts, but the extent to which they overlap is only because of the tendency of addiction to make you poor. The bulk of the poor are not poor because they piss their money away on drugs and casinos.
Moreover, giving people stuff instead of money doesn't help the addicts -- or anyone else -- because stuff is fungible like money, only less efficiently. You give an addict food and shelter and they'll sell the food and sublet the shelter and go blow the money on their addiction. Because the root of their problem isn't that they don't have enough food or housing or money, it's that they need to break their addiction or they will never hold onto those things.
Meanwhile giving out stuff instead of money only costs the taxpayer more for the same amount of benefit, because that inefficiency is universal. You give people money for clothes and they'll buy clothes with it, even if they already have clothes, because they can't spend it on anything else. But that's just a waste of the taxpayer's money, when it could otherwise have gone to something they actually needed.
Imagine, if Google returned money then investor gets the money and now they try to invest it somewhere else, highly likely, these guys will go after companies which Google want to buy out. Why make it expensive for yourself to buy your threats?
The idea is that investment opportunities are shrinking, more money in market for limited opportunity is what creates inflation, makes it expensive for everyone to acquire new companies.
It's specially true for big tech companies where pension funds and other investment fund own large chunk of stock, if they get the money, they'll put it in venture capital or private equity which either increases cost to acquire technology (patents etc...) Or existing businesses.
I am talking specifically about inflation for purchasing future cash cows.