Acqui-hires, amigo... swallow a company, fire the bottom 10%, give the rest offers, see who sticks around after 1-2 years. They're gobbling up companies so fast that they're running out of office space to house them all.
Acqui-hiring cannot be a long term strategy to nurture and build a strong internal talent pool. Google simply has done an outstanding job at this. Most start-up founders/employees share YC startups' cultural ethos, and will get stifled under Apple. Many of them will get demotivated, lose steam and leave as soon as their golden handcuffs expire.
I mean that to continue their strategy they will need to onshore the money, at which point it will be taxed, at which point it looks far less viable in the long term.
You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years.
There's a difference: Apple is a public company (without an insider-friendly voting structure like Google's), and shareholder activism is a powerful force these days. (I am not an expert.) If the current approach stops delivering big profits I think the management will be hard put to resist the pressure to smash up the piñata and hand the cash to the shareholders. (That pressure already exists: http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-to-shareholders-vote-against-... ) So I think the thing protecting the status quo at Apple these days is really the flow, rather than the stock, of profits. And indeed there doesn't seem to be any sign that the apparent decline in the quality of OS X is actually hurting profits or sales yet: http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/07/29/apples-focus-on-va... .
