> Snap, the company that makes the disappearing messaging app Snapchat. Although it is one of the most innovative consumer-focused internet companies
Isn't this part of the problem?
Snap, albeit innovative and fast as they are in creating new paradigms should in no way be the most innovative consumer-facing company.
There's an imbalance here somewhere.
Maybe when it makes sense for everyone to create their own infrastructure, the hold of the five will loosen up. That might require another wave of infrastructure improvements that the huge companies will not be able to compete with the collective many.
I meant: there must/should be more innovative companies that are targeting more fundamental problems.
Of course every company should be as innovative as maximising profit allows.
To reiterate I meant there ought to be lots more companies with bigger dreams than that of Snap, no matter how innovative Snap is. That Snap IS considered one of the most innovative companies is indicative of the problem.
Snap is only considered one of the more innovative companies in consumer facing social. That's it. There's no sense in expanding that to include everything in tech, they are not one of the top few most innovative consumer companies in all of technology.
That Snap gets pegged as that, is a fake set-up to write articles that stick to a script that the writer wants to push. It's equivalent to asking someone's opinion when you've already entirely made up your mind, except in this case it has a particularly negative effect as it's being pushed out into the world as a form of media propaganda.
Here's how it works (to use a famous example of this setup): we expected flying cars and all we got was 140 characters. That's a bullshit setup, it fails to even question whether flying cars make sense, and then sets up Twitter as an ideal example of today's level of innovation (which it never was). While Thiel was pushing that bogus premise, incredible innovation (both hardware and software) had occurred in mobile all around the world in a mere ten years from 2007 to 2017. Drastically improved communication, as one example, is far more important than flying cars.
Innovation is so terrible today! Then hold up mediocre examples of innovation while ignoring the vast, extraordinary innovation going on (from quantum, to crispr, to AI).
That's a big theme lately. They all create copies of latest-billion-dollar business-targeted services, and release before they're fully baked. That's totally the startup approach, but it doesn't feel like an approach that works well when there's already a market leader doing the same thing but significantly better.
BI is another similar area. Quicksight and Data Studio are amazingly deficient compared to Tableau. Data studio can't join SQL tables, and Quicksight leaves you hitting bugs every other page and tried too hard to support fancy charts, but entirely forgot the basic "display some tabular data" option. (Power BI by MSFT does a bit better as I understand it, but is msft-tech-focused. Haven't tried it).
Isn't this part of the problem? Snap, albeit innovative and fast as they are in creating new paradigms should in no way be the most innovative consumer-facing company. There's an imbalance here somewhere. Maybe when it makes sense for everyone to create their own infrastructure, the hold of the five will loosen up. That might require another wave of infrastructure improvements that the huge companies will not be able to compete with the collective many.