I'm not a massive fan of Google or Facebook, but both companies invent lots of things. I recall seeing a demo a couple of years ago from someone at Google working on stabilising video by aligning all of the frames. The end result is a completely smooth animation of video, with all of the camera shake taken out (at the cost of reduced size of picture). I just noticed that Gopro is selling a camera with those features. I don't know if they are licensing the technology from Google, or if they did it themselves, but like I said, Google is working on stuff like that. For Facebook, React is innovative! It's not rocket science, but it solves a huge number of problems.

It's not like AT&T and Xerox were hiring thousands upon thousands of inventors. Xerox was a photocopy company and they pretty much stuck to that (hence their downfall). I don't know exactly how many people worked at PARC, but it wasn't massively huge at any time.

AT&T was an evil monopolistic company that also had a good research division. However, the research division was not its main function. You could compare it to Microsoft now (there are incredibly brilliant people working there right now).

Trust me, it's not worse than it was before.

With tech so highly developed, the market advantage goes from who can build the next great thing to who can have the biggest most profitable user farm.

I mean. They're still there making fine stuff for me to use. I love the Google Photos app. Maximum UX. I can search for photos by person, place, time, or type ("receipts San francisco").

I can translate by pointing Google Translate at a thing and having it be in English on the thing. Wicked shit.

Nah. I love these guys.

You're saying Google or Facebook has not invented anything new? Do you even pay attention to the tech industry?