What roots are you referring to? As pointed out by another in this article's discussion, Zynga has a well documented history of not caring about original production but rather looking around for successfull social games, copying them and throwing way more marketing dollars and gamification techniques at them so as to make the original irrelevant.
I've heard that internally, they call this practice "fast-following". I guess they had to invent some double-speak so the game devs didn't feel so bad in meetings!
They actively look for small games that are just starting to become successful, since those are easier to displace in the market.
