I suggested acquisitions and investment in outside companies that are on track to create a $100 million product within six months but are maybe undervalued by the market. They need to look for situations where there aren't six layers of management to soak up all the rewards.
I've never heard of a company dumping millions of dollars on random developers and I don't think that's possible. They may dump millions of dollars on a VP, but by the time it "trickles down" through all the layers to the team it comes out as "you're lucky to have a job." So in almost all instances it's telling people to kill themselves to launch a $100 million dollar product in six months just so they can keep their jobs (with free food of course). Those people are going to take option 2, quit and go somewhere else, and the product will never launch.
The goal of $100 million isn't that Yahoo wants money. They want to be a sexy, ambitious, developer-oriented employer like Google. They want to experiment, and break things, and most importantly identify what is and isn't working. Rather than letting some cut-rate dev produce a middling Japanese Finance page for his whole career, they want a few impressive brands that will draw new, talented developers in. Free food is part of that branding as well.
Buying a promising startup and smothering it with their existing bureaucracy would only hurt their reputation at this point.
I've never heard of a company dumping millions of dollars on random developers and I don't think that's possible. They may dump millions of dollars on a VP, but by the time it "trickles down" through all the layers to the team it comes out as "you're lucky to have a job." So in almost all instances it's telling people to kill themselves to launch a $100 million dollar product in six months just so they can keep their jobs (with free food of course). Those people are going to take option 2, quit and go somewhere else, and the product will never launch.