https://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Entrepreneurship-Peter-F-D...
Drucker was a critic of the idea that small firms are more innovative than large firms. He provides a wealth of innovation about the styles of innovation that large firms produce.
About this:
"But there’s a more troubling possibility. Maybe something has changed about the nature of innovation, at least in software."
When was this era? From the 1940s to the early 1980s, software development was mostly done at big firms such as IBM and Hewlett Packard. The rise of the personal computer allowed a wave of software firms, such as Microsoft and Adobe, to get going, but even then, the costs of getting such a startup going was much higher than now. The era of the really cheap software startup was basically the era of the CRUD app moved to the Web, basically 1995 to 2015, give or take a few years on either side. My point is, that era is more the exception than the rule, given the history of the industry.
It seems melodramatic to claim that a specific culture was lost, though it is absolutely true that the industry has matured and therefore the situation has changed. We are unlikely to see any more startups come out of Silicon Valley and become huge like Microsoft or Adobe or Google or Facebook.