[sanderjd]

It is an opinion piece, not a fact piece. It isn't trying to make a factual case for the slowing pace of innovation in software, he is saying that is his impression based on his experience in the field, and then using that as a premise to explore a nugget of an idea that builds on that premise. The idea isn't "biotech excites me", the idea is "some fields are limited by the availability of new ideas and others are limited by the ability to execute their ideas; the latter are more exciting".

I think a fact-based article exploring the question of whether software really does have a slowing (or just slow) pace of ideas and innovation would be much more interesting than this article, but not every article has to be factual reporting and synthesis, some can be of the form "I believe this is how the world looks, and I draw these conclusions starting from that belief".

Personally, I relate to his premise, though I'm unsure it's true. It does seem to me that there aren't many new ideas in the industry. We seem to "just" be doing things we've been able to do for a very long time, but making them more accessible to more people, more efficient (with respect to human time while not necessarily computer time), and more scalable. We seem to me to be doing a lot of streamlining but not a huge amount of innovating.