Why "Innovation" is Just Rebranding Incrementalism

The word innovation has been hollowed out so completely that it now describes any minor change. A slightly different UI layout isn't innovation — it's a paint job. We need to stop congratulating companies for moving buttons and start asking whether anything fundamentally new was actually created.

I tend to agree with the framing, but I want to push back on the assumption that incremental progress isn't valuable in itself. Most of what we call "innovation" is a series of tiny improvements stacked together over years — your phone getting 5% faster each year isn't revolutionary individually, but compounding those gains makes it transformative. The real problem isn't incrementality; it's the marketing that collapses the whole stack into a single moment and calls it disruption to justify a higher price tag. We should celebrate genuine leaps when they happen, but we also need to stop treating every feature addition as if it's redefining an entire category.