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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Some can, some can't. IBM was once very good at innovation.

What hurt IBM was not lack of innovation. They got that part right. It was incremental production economies, the thing the article says is a big-company problem. Others could make generic PCs cheaper than IBM. Others could make disks (which were invented at IBM) cheaper than IBM. IBM eventually exited the low end entirely.

3M, GE, and du Pont are big, old companies good at innovation. Westinghouse was too good - too many high-tech products before their time.

Gerber, the baby food company, doing something stupid is not a good example.

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I weep to see people sharing my viewpoints. Too often, quasi-professional observers of industries would make stupid anecdote examples into attention grabbing but misleading and ultimately stupid stories.

To add to your examples (and to bring this closer to hearts of Hacker news audience): Google released Gmail, GMap, GWT, etc. after its initial success; Amazon unleashed AWS after domination of online marketplace; Microsoft jumped into Xbox after establishing itself as "the tech company." Most notably, Apple is only accepted as a mainstream "innovator" (with the slew of products like iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc) after its revival and domination; before that, they were merely a niche player and their products (the many colorful boxes) were never quite celebrated as later creation as market leader.

GMaps were actually acquired by Google

Yes. Earth technology came from Keyhole, and you could buy it, or get it for free if you had an NVidia graphics card. It was really cool in 2003 to go flying over the earth. A dozen years later, it's really about the same, but with a bigger imagery budget.

Even acquisitions can be indicative of innovation. It takes a great deal of effort and vision alike to identify potential acquisitions and successfully build from them. Just buying the company is the easy part. Doing something with your new division, rather than just letting it continue to do its own thing, can be just as challenging as breaking new ground altogether, even if the nature of the challenges are different.

Microsoft's XBox experience is more about throwing money at the problem. The entire first generation of XBox devices was a net loss.

Not just the first gen, they are billions in the hole still

You beat me to the best examples. Especially GE. Anyone acting like big companies can't innovate haven't really done any research at all. I'd also cite the major defense contractors like Honeywell, SAIC, Lockheed, and Boeing. They do plenty of dumb stuff that basically generates jobs and bribes but a good chunk of their work requires smart people inventing new stuff. Maybe Siemens, too, along the same lines.

Also, thinking of the various jokes, how big is IKEA? Just their assemblies and pallets probably should be considered innovation in some way haha.

Or look at retail logistics and sourcing. Or big German car companies in the 90s, when they switched to common platforms that allowed more interchanging between models.

Exactly. Many of those organizations were slower to innovate due to low margins or high cost. Yet, they still did innovations periodically with significant to huge impact. I like focusing on low-margin firms as they provide a nice minimum of what I think is achievable in others.

German hard-discounter Aldi is taking over the Australian retail market very slowly. They have vowed to `suck the profitability out of retail'.

They bring in long-established practices from Germany, and force the Australian retail oligopoly to wake up.

Aldi and Lidl are doing the same thing to the British retail market as well. They are already forcing the other retailers to `simplify their pricing'; ie get rid of confusing multi-buy offers. (British supermarkets used to double a price one week to offer Buy-Two-For-One the week after.)

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/11/sainsburys-...

> Aldi said: “In our view, complicated promotions, multibuy offers and price matching schemes are confusing, are not transparent and do not serve the best interests of consumers. We focus on providing quality products at transparent everyday low prices that consumers can easily understand.”

They keep talking about perpetual price wars between supermarkets in the UK, but it was a pretty cozy place for the incumbents before the Germans showed up.

I would also add Hitachi in there as well. Not as well known in the states for the massive conglomerate that it is but they have a great corporate outlook and focus on long term goals over short term ones.

Hitachi makes the best nailguns.

And massagers. For massaging.

Can you elaborate on the case of Westinghouse? That sounds interesting.

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