The problem with being so big was that if someone did invent something groundbreaking inside Google, it might struggle to see the light of day. Google’s digital ad business was sacrosanct. You didn’t mess with the algorithms that powered it unless you really had to. For all the kudos that Silicon Valley got for being the innovation capital of the world, its biggest companies weren’t all that innovative. Google’s home page had barely changed over the past decade. The iPhone was still the same old rectangular slab of metal. And nearly every new Facebook feature was a direct copy of a competitor
...more
