Meet The New Digital Conglomerates: Google, Facebook, Amazon … And Apple?

Consider: Facebook snapped up shopping search engine TheFind this spring and virtual reality startups Pebbles Interfaces and Surreal Vision last year, building on the social networking leader's 2014 purchase of Oculus VR. E-commerce giant Amazon nabbed cloud computing startups Amiato, 2lemetry, Elemental Technologies and Italy's Nice, as well as chipmaker Annapurna Labs, which brought it new data center technology. Google and its parent Alphabet acquired at least 15 small companies last year, many with mobile technologies. By the 1980s, many were dismantled. Some tech pundits fret that Google, Amazon and Facebook could stray too far from their core businesses as well.