Most innovation is driven by at most a few individuals, but the bar is so high for a viable practical modern operating system that individuals are going to tend to take their innovation elsewhere.

This is not the ideal situation. Ideally, big companies like Microsoft or Apple would enable the right individuals to innovate in this area, unfortunately they are very bad at this. They do not know how to select these individuals, and even more importantly, leaving aside the rare likes of Elon Musk, the notion of radical innovation is rather contradictory to the institution of big business in our era.