I'm not involved in any package manager development, but this strikes me as extremely arrogant. Successful package managers are most definitely not a dime a dozen, and the skills required to make one and maintain it over years are something which the majority of engineers at Google (or anywhere) do not possess. There's a lot more to software engineering than working on the hardest of the hard tech problems, and being very successful on the social side is a huge asset that no company should discount based on the theoretical difficulty of the problem being solved.
Yeah right. Most developers wouldn't be able to even start writing a package manager, let alone maintain it for years as it becomes the most used one for a particular platform.
While that was true 10 years ago; I don't think it still holds. Google is more big generic enterprise now with all trouble innovating that comes with that. Hence, why they must buy to be able to push innovation forward. This is just part of the natural life cycle of a company as it gets big and successful.
