Yeah? Name a product to come out of FB or Google in the past 5 years that has been a major financial success - and acquisitions (like IG, Oculus) don't count. Name anything that has fundamentally changed about those companies in that time.
If you're just aqui-hiring or buying successful products what does that say about your internal culture? Are you super focused on only your primary product, or are the people you've hired kind of not "new product" innovative?
I guess a lot of people think Google/FB == innovation, and they are without a doubt highly innovative, but when it comes to products I'm not really sure that they are. I think most of their innovation comes from improving what they currently do, not really expanding into new markets or with new products.
Maybe I'm wrong? What do you think?
1) Innovation doesn't have to be in creating new products, and can very well be in incremental improvements to existing products.
2) "new products" also doesn't need to be externally visible. There could be lots of innovation but just for things that aren't visible to customers.
Netflix hasn't come out with a new product since streaming started. But there are definitely a lot of new things that are built that are at least arguably innovative.
See https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16949366/google-htc-smart...
This suggests they at least partially outsourced the work initially and then acqui-hired their way into in-housing it.
Though, yes, it is possible that some of it was done in-house from the beginning. Just because they leaned on external resources to some extent doesn't mean they developed no internal capability on their own.