Gotta love these ~30 minute old accounts with 7 karma howling at the moon that the neither the first successful online payments company, nor the most successful social network in Internet history, nor a ~$100billion/year big data company are 'innovative'.
They may not be nuclear fusion or the perpetual motion machine, but they're more innovative than 99% of what everyone else will ever do.
Your point about wealth buying you a soapbox was interesting, but you went off the rails with that middle paragraph.
I think this hyper-"ironic" everything-bashing when it comes to innovation is a very low variety of discourse.
It's true that most of these social media startups are overvalued garbage that are going to prove themselves to be career graveyards (or sandtraps, at the least) when the tide goes out. And the people who join these unimaginative VC darlings for 0.02% of the pie (with preferences against that equity) are going to lose big time. That said, the reflexive "<X> isn't a real innovation" attitude when X is the solution to a real problem (e.g. self-driving cars, fraud detection, or even well-designed smart-phone interfaces) is a bit annoying. It may not be the flying car, but this X is usually something that came out of a lot of hard work on a problem that's just much more difficult than it seems it "should" be.
I think there's a resentment that builds in a lot of people due to a discrepancy between the real forces that produce technological improvements and the popular press. Reality: technological innovation is slow and incremental, with one seemingly insignificant change making another step possible, and that making another step feasible... until there is eventual macroscopic change, over time. It's gradual and, on the surface, doesn't appear that interesting. Popular depiction, for a contrast: visionary businessmen and "technologists" and "hackers" are driving the future. The backlash against that is that people single out these "visionaries" (many of whom are overrated) and denigrate everything they've accomplished as "not a real innovation". There's truth in the matter of these "visionaries" being overrated, but on the other hand, that doesn't mean that technological progress isn't happening. It's just gradual and unpredictable, and often fails to emerge where we want it. Technological progress actually pushes through on its own terms, rather than being pulled where wanted. For example, human transportation has been stagnant in price and quality (in the US) since 1960. That's a real morale problem on a national scale. But to single out Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as "not real innovators" because they haven't cured cancer or delivered $40 worldwide airfares is a big of a leap.
They may not be nuclear fusion or the perpetual motion machine, but they're more innovative than 99% of what everyone else will ever do.
Your point about wealth buying you a soapbox was interesting, but you went off the rails with that middle paragraph.