Comment by CapriciousCptl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CapriciousCptl | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think the point he’s making is some groups (currently too many?) outweigh certain costs compared to uncertain benefits— limiting innovation. It’s along the lines of “nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM.” I don’t think it generalizes beyond the single organization level well considering all the money going into venture capital as of late. And I don’t see it at Apple/Alphabet/Microsoft/Amazon where some of the world’s largest companies continue to innovate and pivot. But, you do see it in terms of Berkshire Hathaway’s investment strategy (which interestingly includes investments in Apple), which is exceedingly conservative by some measures. But part of that is because Buffet is risk-averse (which is different than uncertainty-averse).

I think the article stops short of saying how we would know enough resources are being put into innovation. And for that, I have no idea either.

Apple/Alphabet/Microsoft/Amazon are innovating?

Mostly they seem to be acquiring smaller companies that have come up with interesting ideas.

Apple, especially, appears to be churning out annual updates on a product line that is not changing at all (I'm not blaming them, they're making more money than god, but still).

And pivoting? I guess Alphabet's "it didn't go viral in the first two years so we're dropping it" strategy could be thought of as pivoting, but not really.

Apple created the iPhone 13 years ago. Then Macbook Air a year later, the iPad line and so on. The A13 processor is the fastest mobile processor in widespread use, as was the A12 when it was launched. Do you really expect a company to innovate every single year? Google/Alphabet created K8s seven years ago, Glang, Android, and consistently refines its cloud platform. Its search and advertising platform is very effective and gives enormous value to its customers, even if it's not the "strictly do no evil" innovation of yore. Amazon has grown to enormous scale, innovating along its supply chain and AWS. Microsoft created Azure in almost no time, supports Linux on its own operating system and has embraced JavaScript and has some open source projects. I think, if you remember the Microsoft of 10 years ago (software-only, bitterly proprietary), that's quite a pivot.

> Do you really expect a company to innovate every single year?

I'd say a company as large as Apple would need to innovate hundreds or thousands of times per year, to be comparable to a small startup, in innovativeness per person.

Agreed. Considering their size the innovation output of these companies is really low. Google still hasn’t found anything besides selling ads and total surveillance and Apple mainly makes things thinner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com