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Companies like Cisco seem built around buying all of their innovation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_S...

They seem to be doing well.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/indus...

The culture of Cisco M&A is unlike anything seen in Silicon Valley.

Cisco actively encourages senior engineering employees to leave the company, start new ventures and return as leaders in the M&A process. It's not fair to compare Yahoo to Cisco when Cisco invests tremendous amounts of effort, time and money into these ventures to grow and nurture them (recent example: Meraki) until they can be reabsorbed into the Mothership.

Yahoo on the other hand is buying a bunch of companies that it knows only by reputation. Yahoo might be successful, but not for the same reasons that Cisco is successful. It's just a very different culture.

Exactly - some companies can pull off this kind of acquisition. It's entirely a corporate culture thing.

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