In general, hi-technology companies are relatively young, so for the unenlightened there would be a strong tendency to believe that because of their rather short overall tenure, and in addition to the fact that the hi-tech field appears to be very vibrant and innovative, that they wouldn't need to buy or acquire other companies in order to remain relevant, but, in point of fact, hi-tech companies are constantly buying out other hi-tech companies, from big to small, from developed to just developing, all in an endless cycle of get big, or become irrelevant.
There are a lot of reasons why hi-tech companies like to buy other companies, as well as paying what appears to be insane pricing or princely sums for them, in which one of the most significant reasons is that hi-tech companies are absolutely frightened that if they do not keep up their current trajectory of growth, or do not buy up potential threats to their business model, or do not keep up with other acquisitions that other companies that they are related to are doing, that they may easily end up being the hunted, and not the hunter, as happened with companies that were once as powerful as Yahoo, bought by Verizon, or Sun Microsystems having been bought by Oracle, amongst many, many others.
While most people, don't seem to particularly care about all the hi-tech mergers and acquisitions, there is a potentially insidious problem with such, in which, far too many worthy hi-tech companies, allow themselves to be bought for a very nice premium of their present-day value, which takes what formerly was a competitor and/or an independent company and places it into the fold and arsenal of a major hi-tech conglomerate, which not only consolidates power, but concentrates it, even more appreciably than before. Another thing, that large hi-tech companies are prone to do, is to keep the names of their acquired hi-tech companies the same that they were before being bought, so the uninitiated won't really be aware that YouTube is owned by Alphabet (Google), Skype is owned by Microsoft, jet.com is owned by Wal-Mart, stub hub is owned by eBay, instagram and whatsapp are owned by Facebook, and so on and so forth.
Because the companies doing the acquiring have deep pockets and the right financial connections to both acquire more companies and to finance recent purchases, these type of buy-outs in a hi-tech world, allows those doing the acquiring to demonstratively know more about the very people that utilize their various tools and apps, in ways that permit them to know intimacies and correlations of individuals that are both enlightening and exploitable by such companies in many ways, both good and bad.
In point of fact, the world isn't better off by having just a handful of truly gargantuan hi-technology companies that know everything about everyone, for concentrated knowledge is also exploitable by governmental institutions that have the ability to play rough with hi-tech companies that may not initially cooperate with them. This means, that the government absolutely implicitly does not mind mergers whatsoever between hi-tech companies as it is a lot easier to deal with a very small subset of corporations and executives, than information that is much more evenly disbursed.
It is one thing entirely for hi-tech companies to grow organically and it is an entirely a different thing for hi-tech companies to snatch up revolutionary and disruptive technology by other companies so as to control and mold the overall comprehensive package to their benefit, with the consumers of such, typically none the wiser for it.