Sure they do if they have their IT priorities right. There's a small business in my locale that I can't name that occupies one floor of an office, does all kinds of app development for big companies, and still allocates enough time to innovation that they regularly present clever stuff at conferences dedicated to what they do. That stuff also directly improves their competitiveness in most cases. People might say something similar about Jane St's Ocaml contributions that they turned into a side-effect of doing their business. There's been countless admins in companies with less vision that innovated plenty on semi-automating monitoring, management, and reliability just out of necessity to reduce stress on their overworked brains and hands.
There's tons of potential in companies for IT innovation, whether small- or large-scale. It's proven by those, even tiny firms, that act on it. Most companies act against it on top of under-funding, under-staffing, and over-stretching their IT staff. That combination causes the effect you describe. It's not inherent in any way. If it was, examples I described wouldn't exist.
I sort of agree with both of you. Yes, you can do it in a small shop, and my company does. A lot, actually. But I wouldn't say we exactly allocate time to innovation. It's more about taking a long view and integrating the long view mentality into projects with tight deadlines and immediate needs.
It takes a lot of work, and it feels quite different than the luxury of overt R&D and an emphasis on creating tools. We still mostly have to keep the development of tools to an as-needed basis and just take those opportunities to put an eye on the future. It's a delicate balance.
So to me the GP is not wrong when saying that these companies like Facebook have a serious luxury. That's the luxury to repeatedly experiment and fail with little relative consequence to the business. The rest of us can't afford to spend nearly as much time or make nearly as many mistakes.
Good points. I agree with the point about luxury: some definitely have way more lee-way than others. Your company's method is one of the good methods I referred to. Another is Jane St's where they apparently dedicated time and labor to building better Ocaml tools (incl standard library). Almost every Global 2000 company can afford to do 100x that. Some, to their credit, are contributing things to IT community. Most just don't and even reinforce problems with their decisions.
So, there's certainly a huge gap between most companies and Facebook. Yet, even allocating one person, day, 15% time, etc. to try or build some new things might have quite some results over thousands to hundreds of thousands of companies. I'm just arguing companies could be putting in significantly more effort even without a true R&D department or luxurious business model. Past that, mileage varies from company to company esp with their circumstances.
There's tons of potential in companies for IT innovation, whether small- or large-scale. It's proven by those, even tiny firms, that act on it. Most companies act against it on top of under-funding, under-staffing, and over-stretching their IT staff. That combination causes the effect you describe. It's not inherent in any way. If it was, examples I described wouldn't exist.