All of the companies you cite ARE technically innovative - Google created map-reduce (amongst many other things); Facebook stores, indexes and retrieve billions of images; Twitter contributed real-time graph processing (Storm) to the open-source world, and mostly solved fan-out on a massive scale; Wikipedia - well, it's Wikipedia, and it's done on a tight budget, to boot.
Everyone's standing on the shoulders of giants, but the idea that the contributions of top engineers and scientists today are somehow less than those that came previously is ridiculous - Kay seems hurt that people have taken the ideas and run with them, and doesn't seem to get that not everyone's as smart as him - and that's fine, we can still have something to offer.
Only if they also created a time machine, map and reduce are there in the Common Lisp spec from '84 and doubtless pre-date that by a decade or two.
mostly solved fan-out on a massive scale
Well, if you mean created a poor copy of what Teknekron (now known as Tibco) were doing in '86, and they were mainly commercializing research from the '70s.
It's worth noting that the Google "MapReduce" is not type equivalent to the map (roughly 'a list -> 'b list) and reduce ('a list -> 'b) found in Lisp and functional languages. It is actually in a way, an opposite. That is, the map (roughly 'a -> 'b list) in mapreduce is actually more like the dual/opposite of reduce (unfold). And reduce is well, a complicated beast.
I think - the ideas behind MapReduce are not difficult but nor are they necessarily inevitable. The innovative part of MapReduce is Google getting to a place such that the constraints force that approach as obvious. MapReduce is impressive.
Everyone's standing on the shoulders of giants, but the idea that the contributions of top engineers and scientists today are somehow less than those that came previously is ridiculous - Kay seems hurt that people have taken the ideas and run with them, and doesn't seem to get that not everyone's as smart as him - and that's fine, we can still have something to offer.