Same thing for Twitter and all these other social media sites. How does Google have so many engineers yet so many failed products? It’s a narrow perspective to take on and a wrong one.
Actually the division of labour at large companies is impressive and it becomes apparent if you look at the amount of actual output from them.
These FAANG companies aren’t just building websites. They are managing larges amounts of complex infrastructure, because scaling the amount of engineers a company can have requires it.
They are designing incredibly complex products. Apple’s products are descriptively simple and don’t represent the amount of work required to get there.
They are maintaining and insane amount of code and ensuring it works reliably. It’s easy to point at the one day with the Google Maps SDK failure or the Facebook SDK failure while forgetting the many days there wasn’t one.
Lately they are investing in privacy and security, which is another huge effort that I think the public underestimates. It’s easy to ensure data is deleted in a database, but it’s a completely different problem to ensure that data is deleted across all your infrastructure and to ensure it stays that way while teams rapidly develop software.
Startups and smaller companies can compete with large behemoths because they are only focusing on one or two things (or should be). But when you focus on one thing you lose sight of how hard it is to focus on one thousand things.