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>they've nothing significant to show for all that time and money spent when they were raking it in without a serious competitor. Big companies rarely innovate
by carlmr 8y ago
>they've nothing significant to show for all that time and money spent when they were raking it in without a serious competitor.
Big companies rarely innovate without competition around.
- yohann305 8y agoThis is certainly a myth. Everyone knows, including big companies, that as you grow in size you have a harder time innovating. The classic "lean startup" book mentions this issue and gives the example of Intuit's in-house accelerator/incubator. No way Intel doesn't know about it too. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/04/19/innovation-isnt-just-for-startups-how-big-companies-can-tap-their-creative-power/#535dd848686b https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/04/19/in...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gowld 8y agoWhat myth? As you say, bigger companies have a harder time innovting.
- gray_-_wolf 8y agoYeah, but it's not necessarily related to competion, size is primary factor. At least I believe that was his point.
- js8 8y agoI think it is related to competition. Lack of competition brings complacency of executives, who think they can get free money for shareholders without having to reinvest into innovation. (And I think that was carlmr's point.) Of course, if you are bigger, the more likely it is that there is no competition at certain times.
- carlmr 8y agoYeah, my point was that a big company can coast without innovating. They usually have a lot of stuff to sell that they have done in the past. The pressure to rejuvenate comes from outside, rarely from the inside (surely there are exceptions as with every good rule). If you can survive without investing, a lot of companies choose not to.
- gehsty 8y agoApple / Google / Amazon don’t seem to struggle? Microsoft / IBM and now Intel defintely did. I think it has more to do with the leadership of the company than the size of the company.
- senozhatsky 8y agoDoes Google innovate? -ss
- lordlimecat 8y agoHave you seen how many messaging apps theyve made in the last few years?
- gsich 8y agoAnd it's still a mess that nobody wants to use.
- GrumpyNl 8y agoTook over 500 lightbulbs before there was a usable one. Just dont give up.
- retbull 8y agoI wish they would fix up one of the existing ones rather than keep shoving out new half finished ones. I poked around in a few of them from a web client and phone perspective for a while and still don't feel like they beat Slack.
- noobermin 8y agoThis is sarcasm right? Messaging apps are the height of "innovation?"
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pome 8y ago
- gameswithgo 8y agowasn't bell labs part of a very big corporation when they invented basically everything about the modern world?
- nutjob2 8y agoBell Labs invented Google, Facebook, etc? Wow, did not know that. But as you say, the labs were a very small, independent part of a very big corporation, which is likely why they did interesting things. The other thing is that they were forced by the government to license transistor patents to others, who actually created almost everything else. By your theory the military invented the internet, so they invented the modern world. A huge and wasteful military is the key!
- jrockway 8y agoGoogle and Facebook would look a lot different without transistors.
- cestith 8y agoAnd lasers. And Unix. And switched networking. And binary digital computers. And long-haul undersea cables. And the first successful communications satellite. And data networking. http://blog.tmcnet.com/next-generation-communications/2011/08/the-top-bell-labs-innovations---part-i-the-game-changers.html http://blog.tmcnet.com/next-generation-communications/2011/0...
- grkvlt 8y agoYes, but apart from that, what have the Romans, er, Bell Labs ever given us?
- wlesieutre 8y agoThey didn't invent Google and Facebook, but they're responsible for transistors, lasers, Unix, C and C++, CCD digital image sensors, long distance microwave radio relays, the first transatlantic phone cable, MOSFETs, communication satellites, and cell networks. Not modern internet services no, but all of the infrastructure it's built on is grounded on theirs.
- pcnix 8y agoThis is also the topic of the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen.
- Bartweiss 8y agoI don't think this is necessarily true for big hardware companies. If you're selling a subscription to a best-in-market service, there's not a lot of motive to innovate, agreed. Maybe you'd try a new product or a premium variant, but there's no reason to sink effort into advances that won't let you expand userbase or raise prices. But for Intel? Before AMD got going, Intel's biggest competition was itself 9/18 months previously. Innovation wasn't just for new devices and new buyers, it was how they sold updated processors for machines that were already Intel Inside. They're not waiting on processors to die, they're actively pushing for them to be replaced for performance reasons. That might create an incentive to release 'good enough' updates and dole out big improvements gradually, but in practice any of that which happened was already ending. Intel appears to be up against the wall regarding 10nm even with a competitor, and has been attempting major innovations to handle 7nm and below for years. With a revenue stream that relies on annual improvements to their product, they seem to have been learning hard into innovation and struggling, rather than waiting for a competitor.
- fpoling 8y agoIt is really a nice point about competing with themselves. The volume of Intel is rather big that they have to sell to the same customer each 2-3 years even if CPUs are in principle can last 10 years or more. So they must increase the performance substantially to justify the sales.
- chrischen 8y agoThis is a great argument to be against the recent trends of companies moving to subscription models just for the heck of it.
- Bartweiss 8y agoDefinitely. The common complaint about subscription models is obviously good: if the company folds you have nothing, instead of an unsupported product. But it neglects the other issue, which is that companies intentionally cut off the possibility of "good enough" to guarantee revenue. I don't think its an accident that products like Microsoft Office went to subscriptions around the time it becomes very hard to imagine a new feature actually worth buying for.