"Things that only take 7 or so years to develop just cannot be that hard to do."

Interesting perspective.

I know a company that just completed the development of a new ultrasound system. The system, when deployed, will benefit hundreds of thousands of people around the world. And it was built by a for-profit corporation.

Building that system took about four years. That's four years of 150+ individuals working directly on its design and realization. That means writing code, doing industrial design, laying out PCBs with 20+ layers and thousands of components, working out soldering processes via electron microscopy, ensuring regulatory requirements such as IEC 60601 3rd Edition are met, managing complex schedules, debugging extremely difficult problems, etc.

Now, go even one level deeper and think about the tens or hundreds of thousands of people involved in developing the components and systems used to build this new ultrasound system. How about the software used to design ASICs? Systems on a chip, like the TI DaVinci series? And what of the businessman that starts a reliability lab so customers can get dye and pry services to analyze BGA soldering problems?

Is this the kind of innovation that you choose to label so derisively?