> The US has Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, X, all of which innovate to offer products appealing enough that customers are willing to use or buy them in a free and consensual transaction (which does not require any impoverishment). If they fail at innovating to appeal to customers, they go bankrupt.
I make iPhone apps.
No Apple software update has appealed to me since back when they were still named after cats. In agregate they have added some useful stuff, but even then what has gotten worse over the years means my only interest in updates is (1) the security issues and (2) the way all developers (including me!) are pushed towards supporting only the most recent releases that in turn means that even modern websites, let alone apps, don't work right on older systems: https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2024/07/03/running-10.6-snow...
And, bluntly, the library updates are also unimpressive, SwiftUI has obviously been the intended way forward for a while now, but even Apple themselves have to keep updating UIKit because SwiftUI isn't good enough yet: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/10118
Microsoft has a very different set of issues, but at least they sucessfully diversified into gaming platforms without destroying their dominance in office work. But how much of that dominance is the updates, vs. backward compatibility with so many people's old documents that would be extraordinarily difficult for 3rd parties to replicate? https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
And they have LinkedIn now, which has weirdly become my standard minigames(!) experience, presumably because someone finalky noticed games helped Facebook get stickier back in the day.
Amazon's consumer offerings suck. Almost everything I've bought from the website has had some issue or turned out to have been more expensive than the same stuff from a local shop I just hadn't found yet. But most people tell me AWS is good, so there's that.
FB and X's main asset is network effects, not tech. The web version of FB has bugs that I'd expect from a junior with no oversight, not a $1.5T market cap giant. Meta is more than FB these days, but is that enough? Horizons was a disaster for them, and they were outraged by Apple's ad changes that only implemented what various laws already required, their foundations may turn out to be a marshy flood plain.
No, what these companies have is mindshare, branding, and deep enough pockets to make government-scale spending capital allocations and survive their inevitable incorrect allocations.
(And by being so big that governments listen to them, regulatory capture etc.)