Apple/Alphabet/Microsoft/Amazon are innovating?

Mostly they seem to be acquiring smaller companies that have come up with interesting ideas.

Apple, especially, appears to be churning out annual updates on a product line that is not changing at all (I'm not blaming them, they're making more money than god, but still).

And pivoting? I guess Alphabet's "it didn't go viral in the first two years so we're dropping it" strategy could be thought of as pivoting, but not really.

Apple created the iPhone 13 years ago. Then Macbook Air a year later, the iPad line and so on. The A13 processor is the fastest mobile processor in widespread use, as was the A12 when it was launched. Do you really expect a company to innovate every single year? Google/Alphabet created K8s seven years ago, Glang, Android, and consistently refines its cloud platform. Its search and advertising platform is very effective and gives enormous value to its customers, even if it's not the "strictly do no evil" innovation of yore. Amazon has grown to enormous scale, innovating along its supply chain and AWS. Microsoft created Azure in almost no time, supports Linux on its own operating system and has embraced JavaScript and has some open source projects. I think, if you remember the Microsoft of 10 years ago (software-only, bitterly proprietary), that's quite a pivot.

> Do you really expect a company to innovate every single year?

I'd say a company as large as Apple would need to innovate hundreds or thousands of times per year, to be comparable to a small startup, in innovativeness per person.

Agreed. Considering their size the innovation output of these companies is really low. Google still hasn’t found anything besides selling ads and total surveillance and Apple mainly makes things thinner.