Having been involved in the other side of these types of transactions usually the large company is actually interested in making the purchase because buying a successful product is easier than building your own even if you're something as big as Amazon. however often during Discovery you find out major problems with the company that you want to acquire that make it become pointless to actually do it. usually by the time something like this happens and a large company is looking to make an acquisition there already a good portion of the route down figuring out what they would have done in the first place. the Delta on building a flashlight over Amazon's general retail presence isn't that huge so in a lot of cases they would be looking to acquire interesting pieces of tack or the customer base as a way to bootstrap their version. If during due diligence that showed to not be feasible then the deal wouldn't go through. They're also very likely to be talking to several companies in a similar area.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen but I'm just explaining what happens on the other side.
I've also seen some areas where we used a technical due diligence team so that there was no IP crossover and it turns out that the company that we wanted to acquire was either way too difficult to onboard due to the way that they built their systems or they just wanted way more money then we were willing to pay because our use of their systems was different than their grand vision and they were pricing on their grand vision. also in one of those cases we were playing the two companies off of each other for price and then decided not to build a product at all.
And sometimes like the atom bomb all it takes is a due-diligence person saying there isn't much here for everyone else to realize that it's actually quite easy to build but it was very expensive and difficult to prove that you could build it in the first place. See Groupon for example of the explosion of daily deal websites after Groupon proved that they could "make money" off of it.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen but I'm just explaining what happens on the other side.
I've also seen some areas where we used a technical due diligence team so that there was no IP crossover and it turns out that the company that we wanted to acquire was either way too difficult to onboard due to the way that they built their systems or they just wanted way more money then we were willing to pay because our use of their systems was different than their grand vision and they were pricing on their grand vision. also in one of those cases we were playing the two companies off of each other for price and then decided not to build a product at all.
And sometimes like the atom bomb all it takes is a due-diligence person saying there isn't much here for everyone else to realize that it's actually quite easy to build but it was very expensive and difficult to prove that you could build it in the first place. See Groupon for example of the explosion of daily deal websites after Groupon proved that they could "make money" off of it.