When Meta unveiled its latest VR headset, the tech press barely glanced up. Not because the device was bad. It was technically impressive (not that I really cared about VR headsets). But because we’ve seen this movie before.
Another iteration. Another incremental upgrade. Another billion-dollar bet that feels more like defensive positioning than genuine innovation. It’s the new era of Big Tech, where companies with the most resources are taking the fewest risks.
The Irony of Infinite Resources
I find it somewhat weird. Watching some of the world’s most powerful tech companies sitting on a gazillion dollars in cash reserves, just to play it safe. The same companies that once rewrote the rules and meta of entire industries.
- Google changed search and how we access information
- Amazon shook the retail industry in the West and built a cloud infrastructure that powers half the internet
- Social platforms connecting billions across the world
And now? They’re mostly copying each other’s homework.
The Pattern I Can’t Unsee
Look at what Big Tech has shipped in the past five years. Instagram launched Reels to counter TikTok. YouTube followed with Shorts. Facebook added Stories after Snapchat.
To top that off, Google’s Bard (now Gemini) arrived as a panicked response to ChatGPT.
This isn’t innovation. It’s feature parity with sleek marketing.
And the acquisition strategy?
Rather than building transformative products, Big Tech increasingly just buys potential threats before they can mature. The list of promising startups absorbed into their gravitational pull reads like a graveyard of what might have been.
These weren’t investments in innovation. They were insurance policies against disruption.
Meanwhile, the genuinely experimental projects get quietly shelved. Google, once famous for its “20% time” that encouraged employees to chase passion projects, has systematically killed its most interesting experiments. Wave. Reader. Google+. Inbox. Stadia. Dozens of others.
My take on that?: If it doesn’t immediately scale to billions of users, it’s not worth pursuing.
The Success Prison
Big Tech has become risk-averse. It’s due to the tyranny of quarterly earnings, pushed by Wall Street, which doesn’t reward bold experiments because they would punish uncertainty.
Investors want predictable growth, not visionary bets that might take a decade to pay off.
But organizations with hundreds of thousands of employees don’t move like startups, no matter how many “innovation labs” they create. Every new idea navigates layers of approval, legal review, privacy compliance, accessibility standards, internationalization requirements, and brand guidelines.
By the time a genuinely novel concept survives this dumpster fire gauntlet, it’s been committee-approved into something safe. All sharp edges removed.
Market dominance becomes a cage. When you own the platform, the search engine, the operating system, the social network, your incentives fundamentally change. You’re no longer disrupting the incumbent. You are the incumbent.
Their job is protecting the moat, not draining it to start over.
The culture has shifted. Early employees at these companies were missionaries. True believers who thought technology could change humanity. Many of today’s employees (including my friends)? Mercenaries.
Drawn by compensation packages and résumé prestige. That’s not a judgment. It’s an observation about what happens when you optimize hiring for total comp over mission alignment.
You get people who execute well but rarely challenge the status quo.
Fear pervades everything. Fear of regulation. Fear of public backlash. Fear of making mistakes in an era of social media pile-ons.
Big Tech has been hauled before Congress, hit with antitrust investigations, blamed for election interference, and accused of addicting children.
The result?
A defensive crouch. Better to ship something boring and safe than something bold that becomes the next PR crisis.
What We’re Losing (I Think)
For startups, the game feels increasingly rigged. Why pour your heart into building something revolutionary when the most likely outcome is getting crushed by a Big Tech clone or acquired and slowly suffocated inside a corporate bureaucracy?
The path to success has narrowed: stay small and niche, or get absorbed. The dream of building the next truly independent tech giant feels quaint. Almost naive.
For consumers, we’re living through technological stagnation disguised as progress. Our phones get slightly better cameras each year. Apps load marginally faster. But where’s the leap? Where’s the moment that makes us reimagine what’s possible?
For society, the costs are harder to measure but potentially more serious. The big problems we face, such as climate change, healthcare accessibility, education inequality, and sustainable energy, require bold, risky, long-term thinking.
The kind that doesn’t fit neatly into quarterly earnings reports. When organizations with the most resources and talent are optimizing ad clicks instead of solving civilization-scale challenges, we’re all poorer for it.
As a foreigner living in Taiwan, having been around the world before I met my wife, I can say that the West is losing ground.
While American Big Tech has grown cautious, other nations aren’t standing still. China’s tech sector has produced genuinely novel platforms like TikTok and WeChat that reimagined social interaction.
Smaller countries are experimenting with digital governance, digital currencies, and digital infrastructure in ways that make Silicon Valley look backward. Is the assumption that American tech leadership is permanent? Deserves serious scrutiny.
Innovation Hasn’t Died, It’s Just Moved
The most exciting technological developments aren’t happening in Menlo Park or Mountain View anymore. AI startups like Anthropic and Mistral are pushing boundaries with language models, often with a fraction of Big Tech’s resources.
They’re moving faster because they have less to lose and more to prove. The open-source AI community has created models rivaling proprietary offerings, proving innovation doesn’t require billion-dollar budgets. Just freedom to experiment.
In healthcare, companies are using AI for drug discovery and developing non-invasive diagnostic tools. In climate tech, startups are working on carbon capture, sustainable materials, and next-generation batteries. The list goes on.
The tools of innovation have been democratized. Cloud infrastructure, open-source frameworks, and AI models mean a small team can now build what would’ve required massive corporate resources a decade ago.
The distribution oligopoly is harder to break because you still play by Apple’s App Store rules, but the creation barrier is lower than ever.
Final Word
We’ve been here before, if you’re old enough to remember.
IBM dominated computing in the 1970s and became so focused on protecting mainframes that it missed the personal computer revolution. Ironically, it enabled that revolution by outsourcing the operating system to a tiny company back then called Microsoft.
Microsoft dominated the 1990s, became so focused on protecting Windows that it missed the internet, then mobile, then nearly missed the cloud.
Now the Big Tech giants of the 2010s risk missing whatever comes next because they’re too busy protecting what they’ve already built.
But I believe this cycle suggests the current stagnation won’t last forever. Some scrappy startup (probably one that doesn’t exist yet) will build something making today’s platforms look as quaint as Friendster.
In the meantime, we’re leaving enormous problems unsolved and opportunities unexplored.
We should stop settling for incremental updates dressed as innovation. Stop accepting “this is the best we can do” from companies sitting on hundreds of billions in cash. They’re not running out of money, talent, or resources.
It’s running out of courage.