Thanks for your response. There was plenty of innovation clear to anyone with the proximity and education to recognize it, but your questions raise intractable

Thanks for your response. There was plenty of innovation clear to anyone with the proximity and education to recognize it, but your questions raise intractable issues of the proprietary information of any large corporation. From my naive college kid's vantage point, the majority of innovation was tactical and not tied to core competencies owing to the siloed nature of communication between management and technical layers; i.e. it's difficult, if not impossible, for innovation to pass through that gated silo without a catalyst to nurture and support its transformation from tactical to strategic. This is a fundamental problem of complementary assets and the need for interdisciplinary culture that accrues to their composition, complexity, and collaborative community. We could certainly debate whether this is the crux of "The Corporation" over the last twenty years of acquisitions seemingly aimed at silencing competition. Of the two companies I worked with in that time period thirty years ago, both of their nail-in-the-coffin, final acquisitions approached $20 billion. Innovation has a way of disappearing in the dark subtext of large corporate acquisitions. The "never given a chance to thrive" is insightful beyond US Steel. That is, well into modern tech startups that are managed by the same kinds of people who managed GM in the 1970's.