Would a bunch of small companies have invented the smartphone? I feel like you often need to have concentrations of a lot of capital at once for big things to happen.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/t...
That's a weak argument. Email existed before Gmail, web search existed before Google Search, maps even online ones, existed before Google Maps, mobile OSes existed before Android.
> Photos is not exactly innovative
That's what I used to think - another photo sharing/storage thingie. But it has all sorts of crazy machine-learning powered features.[1]
1. https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0324/How-Google-Ph...