To wit, Google has 80k employees now, in 2010 it was at 10k and the number only drops as you go further back. I think it's pretty easy to say that Google was doing more impressive things at the beginning of the century, and certainly the climb was greater. Within the last five years, there was a moment when Google had 4 competing chat apps. This is pretty rank inefficiency. If you were to take 80k people (not all are engineers, obviously) and sit them down and ask them to use their talents to build separately, you'd end up with a lot more innovation and productivity, I'm pretty certain of that.
The entire point of a minimum viable product is not that you have a complete, flawless app, but rather that you get something up you can iterate on quickly. That can be built in a weekend (I'm a slow worker, but I know people that can do crazy stuff in a night and interest). My personal criticism (and something I'm testing), is that our current processes are not harnessing all the gains in productivity we've seen over the decades, nor the ability to do that because it is very cheap to do so is not happening on a large scale. It's not totally apparent why it is happening, but it isn't.
I realized late that people take this criticism personally and feel like you're saying they are stupid or don't work hard or it is all so easy, but I ask you to consider the nature of our industry and how easy things are to build and then ask you why we don't see real competition across so many products.
The moats of many companies are perceived. The goal isn't to build Google in a weekend, it's to take the first step and give yourself an opportunity.
edit: my numbers are off, it's 25k to 100k