Big Tech’s Big Con and How Brands Can Escape

Image credit: Bagus Hernawan via Unsplash​

Big Tech has pulled off one of the most successful sleights of hand in modern business. They have convinced the world they are the great enablers of innovation while quietly keeping the real breakthroughs for themselves and selling everyone else the tools to move a little faster doing exactly what they have always done.

Inside their own walls these companies run on a diet of moonshot projects, hackathons, and experimental labs. Google’s famous “20% time” gave birth to Gmail and Google Maps. Meta’s hacker culture spawned the Like button. Amazon has thousands of experiments running at any given time. This is a culture designed to stretch the possible, to make bets that might take years to pay off, to risk failure in pursuit of something new.

But the products they sell you are SaaS subscriptions, plug and play APIs, cloud dashboards, AI wrappers…everything polished for scale, safety, and incremental efficiency. The message is seductive: Do not reinvent the wheel, just rent ours.

And most companies have listened.

The Pendulum Stuck on Convergence

Business innovation used to swing between two modes. Divergence was when someone reimagined the game entirely such as IKEA making furniture flat pack and self assembled, Netflix jumping from DVDs to streaming, or McDonald’s applying assembly line principles to burgers. Convergence was when everyone scrambled to catch up, imitating the new model until it became the industry standard.

That back and forth kept markets dynamic. But over the last decade something broke. The pendulum got stuck. Companies stopped swinging for their own big leaps and started renting innovation from Big Tech instead. Why gamble on a risky new model when you can buy a ready made system from a vendor who has already done the hard work?

The trade off is subtle but devastating. Cloud infrastructure, enterprise platforms, and AI services make you more efficient but they also make you more like everyone else. The more we adopt the same tools, follow the same “best practices,” and chase the same KPIs, the more interchangeable our strategies and outputs become.

How Big Tech Holds the Edge

This was not an accident. The tech giants have built their dominance on a three part playbook.

First, they nurture an internal culture of relentless experimentation. Second, they package and sell the safe, standardised outputs of that culture to everyone else. And third, they aggressively acquire anything that might threaten their position not just to expand their capabilities but to prevent competitors from gaining an edge.

They have also mastered the art of locking in advantage from deep integrations across industries to lobbying power that slows down regulatory threats. The result is that over the past seven years tech earnings have grown two to three times faster than the rest of the market. This is not just about efficiency. They are not winning at the old game, they are writing the new one.

The Convergence Crisis

When every company uses the same tools in the same ways a strange flattening happens. Strategy becomes a euphemism for operational efficiency. Dashboards dictate direction. OKRs, NPS scores, churn rates — the same metrics, optimised endlessly, but never questioned.

Tactics once seen as cutting edge such as agile workflows, A B testing, and growth hacking have become industry hygiene factors. Job descriptions blur into each other, hiring from the same talent pools with the same certifications. Organisational structures converge too as everyone builds cross functional teams, centers of excellence, and standardised reporting suites.

The risk is that you can run faster and faster but you are still on the same hamster wheel as everyone else. And the only companies truly breaking free are the ones that never stopped prioritising their own big swings.

How brands can escape the trap

Breaking out of convergence means resisting the comfort of the ready made and committing to building again.

That starts with talent. Big Tech hires people who thrive on creation not just operation — mavericks, hackers, the weird ones, people with unusual backgrounds. You need the same kind of talent density in your brand if you want to win. Simply stop hiring the same. Start hiring outliers.

It also means making creativity a habit not a project. It's not about Cannes or D&AD or making ads that creative directors high five over. It is about small teams, running fast and failing constantly. Trying to build new brand innovation, NPD and new revenue streams.

And of course, it is also about placing bolder bets. In a world where every other brand uses the same tools, shots for short-term efficiency and optimisation… bolder bets and the key to exponential growth. Nike’s acquisition of RTFKT to accelerate its metaverse play was a leap into unknown territory. Progressive’s usage based insurance in 2008 required rethinking the entire pricing model. Both moves were risky. Both paid off because they were not afraid to diverge while others converged.

Finally you need leadership willing to make real strategic choices to depart from the benchmark even when it feels safer to follow. Strategy is about setting a unique direction not optimising for the same targets as your competitors.

Read more from Defiant here.