Sure, they could buy every startup in existence. But could they hold them?
If you buy a startup and then put it on a shelf, the employees quit and use the money you gave them to make another startup, or retire to Barbados. You have to keep them busy, and interested, and to do that you have to challenge them, flatter them, help them to grow. Who has the time to do that with all the companies in the Valley at once?
The flip side of this paradox is: Steve Ballmer controls billions of dollars, but he can't buy time. There's only one Steve Ballmer, and he can only make so many decisions in a year, no matter how much he spends.
Frankly, I think giving Microsoft the gift of every startup in the Valley might be a very effective way to kill the company. They wouldn't have any idea what to do with them all. The flood of brilliant new employees would overwhelm the existing corporate culture. Everyone would spend five years sitting in cubicles, editing .emacs files, upmodding posts on news.yc, going to the occasional meeting to talk to the shell-shocked managers who are desperately trying to bolt everything together into some kind of strategy, and waiting for vesting day -- when they will all leave and start another bunch of tiny companies. In other words, it would be like Microsoft probably is now, only more so.
If you buy a startup and then put it on a shelf, the employees quit and use the money you gave them to make another startup, or retire to Barbados. You have to keep them busy, and interested, and to do that you have to challenge them, flatter them, help them to grow. Who has the time to do that with all the companies in the Valley at once?
The flip side of this paradox is: Steve Ballmer controls billions of dollars, but he can't buy time. There's only one Steve Ballmer, and he can only make so many decisions in a year, no matter how much he spends.
Frankly, I think giving Microsoft the gift of every startup in the Valley might be a very effective way to kill the company. They wouldn't have any idea what to do with them all. The flood of brilliant new employees would overwhelm the existing corporate culture. Everyone would spend five years sitting in cubicles, editing .emacs files, upmodding posts on news.yc, going to the occasional meeting to talk to the shell-shocked managers who are desperately trying to bolt everything together into some kind of strategy, and waiting for vesting day -- when they will all leave and start another bunch of tiny companies. In other words, it would be like Microsoft probably is now, only more so.