Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires’ that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech talent.
不过，这两款应用后来都被废弃了，此前微软表示在自己的产品中使用了它们最好的功能。他们的工程师团队留下来，使他们成为众多“收购者”中的两个，而这些“收购者”是大公司用来满足他们对科技人才永不满足的渴望的。
To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Amold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day tum into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.
对微软的批评者来说，奇妙清单和日出的命运就是一个例子，说明了大科技公司无情地试图扼杀任何在他们道路上的创新公司。“他们买下了这些幼苗，然后关闭了它们，”位于旧金山的Switch Ventures合伙人Paul Amold抱怨道，他把可能有朝一日会变成竞争对手的付费企业。微软对此拒绝置评。
When Microsoft bought task management app. Wunerlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015, it picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’ own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the start-ups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.
当微软购买任务管理APP时。奇妙清单APP（Wunerlist）和日出日历APP（mobile calendar Sunrise）在2015年推出的两款新产品，在硅谷引起了相当大的轰动。微软自己的办公软件在“生产力”软件市场上占据主导地位，但这些初创公司代表了一股新的技术浪潮，这些技术是为智能手机世界从头开始设计的。
However, critics say the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.
然而，批评人士说，这些大公司利用此类交易，在其业务有机会获得发展势头之前收购最具威胁性的潜在竞争对手，在某些情况下，这是简单地关闭这些公司的“买入并卖出”策略的一部分。
Like other start-up investors, Mr Amold’s own business often depends on selling start-ups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result: “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on. But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”
与其他初创企业投资者一样，阿莫尔德自己的业务往往依赖于向规模较大的科技公司出售初创企业，不过他承认，他对这一结果的看法不一：“我认为，如果我戴上自私的帽子，这些东西对我有好处。但它们对美国经济有好处吗？我不知道。”
Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tm, rifling through such small deals — many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise-might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4 billion a year on sub-$1 billion acquisitions over the past five years-a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130 billion of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.
考虑到它们的总市值超过5.5万亿美元，突击完成这些小交易——其中许多交易远不如《神灵战士》和《日出》那么突出——似乎不切实际。其中，这五家公司（苹果、微软、谷歌、亚马逊和Facebook）在过去五年中平均每年仅花费34亿美元进行10亿美元以下的收购，与它们庞大的财务储备以及去年在美国投资的1300多亿美元风险资本相比，这只是沧海一粟。
The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.
美国联邦贸易委员会表示，它希望找到这个问题的答案。本周，该公司向五家最有价值的美国科技公司询问了过去十年中许多小规模收购的相关信息。尽管这只是现阶段的一个研究项目，但这一要求提高了监管机构涉足早期科技市场的可能性，而到目前为止，这些市场还无法触及。
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