Which Tech Giants Have Stopped Innovating?
Once a firework rocket’s fuel is exhausted, it continues rising due to inertia. It appears ascendant, but it will soon fall to the earth.
Tech giants are like that. You can’t just evaluate them based on their position in the market, using metrics like market share or profit. These are lagging indicators. Leading indicators are whether a company has launched an innovative product at scale, or has the potential to scale. The “at scale” part is important because anything less doesn’t move the needle for a trillion-dollar company. With that in mind, let’s discuss a few tech giants 1:
Apple: ✅ Apple continues to innovate, with the M1 and M2 CPUs, for example. Or the AirPods, whose revenue is multiple times Twitter’s.
Amazon: ✅ Amazon continues to innovate. For example, AWS Lambda may change how we build backends 2 across the entire industry.
Microsoft: ❌ The Microsoft products I use don’t show much innovation. Windows 11 is only a slightly more polished version of Windows 10. Windows had interesting ideas like Sets, which is a window that can house tabs from multiple applications. For example, if you’re planning a vacation, you could have browser tabs, an Explorer window and a text editor to take quick notes, all in one window. But these innovative ideas got killed. Moving on from Windows, Azure is still used only by Microsoft-centric shops, the companies that used to use Windows Server and other Windows products before the cloud. No startup I know uses Azure. LinkedIn hasn’t improved noticeably. Moving on to Microsoft hardware like Surface, I used a Surface Laptop 4 and found it unremarkable, no better than my LG Gram 17 or Macbook. I’m not into gaming, but I don’t see anything game-changing there. For example, my friends are not calling me excited about playing VR games for hours every day on their Xbox.
Google: ❌ None of the main Google products — search, Keep, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Drive, Calendar, Youtube, Android — has improved much. High-profile initiatives like Google X went nowhere. Innovation in productivity like Calendly or Notion is not being delivered by Google or Microsoft.
Meta: ❌ WhatsApp hasn’t improved in any significant way. I’m still using it the way I used to use it years back. As for Facebook and Insta, I don’t use them, and my impression is that they haven’t improved hugely. The company itself has become toxic, dooming some of its new products like Libra cryptocurrency or the Portal smart speaker.
Do I expect the companies that scored a ❌ to die soon? No, companies can coast for a long time on inertia, their market position and lock-in, like a firework rocket that has exhausted its fuel. But in the long-term, the companies that scored a ❌ will be irrelevant, like Yahoo.
Inspired by a conversation with Kewal Krishna.
Earlier, Lambda suffered from cold starts, but they’ve now allowed utilization-based scaling, similar to EC2: LambdaProvisionedConcurrencyUtilization.