Surprise! Someone in the financial-news business has noticed that Apple doesn't innovate anymore.
Well, DUH! Big, publicly-traded companies haven't innovated in a long time. Their structure and modern accounting rules make it nigh-impossible.
Remember: NIH no longer stands for Not Invented Here. These past many years, it's been No Inventing Here. Engineers in established corporations, even moderate-sized ones, are forbidden to do anything new and exciting. Management's attitude is: let the little guys do the innovating, and if they look like they might succeed we'll buy them.
But... the little guys are increasingly crowded out of Silicon Valley. The old hotbed-of-innovation habitat is being bulldozed at an accelerating pace. There's still plenty of talent here, but there's no room for their little shoestring-budget speculative ventures*.
As with much else, the collapse is currently in slow motion, and masked by an aggressive Potemkin economy. I just hope the current "rebound" keeps on for another year, as I fumble for the striped handle.
* Yeah, there are hackerspaces, and TechShop. Cool if you're doing an open-source group project, but have you looked at the cost of renting a private space for a group to work on something commercial and confidential, which needs to be left set up rather than being torn down and put away after each work session?
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