It's much quicker and often not that much more expensive (after you tally up all the engineering and marketing costs and adjust for the risk of failure) to acquire a company that already has a working product, customers, marketing, documentation and usually you get a team of domain experts included in the purchase.

I mean, it's someone else's code, your engineers are going to say it's rubbish, it needs a full rewrite and throwing away, warn us up front before you even think about acquiring such terrible code, etc. But if it's a built a company to the point of raising sufficient revenue/profit it's surely good enough.

There are many variations to this kind of 'vendor dd', you can prepare it beforehand or you can push to have the process modified until it is to your liking depending on how desirable you are.