I fail to see why innovation in the lighting space is not a worthy endeavor for GE. By analogy, personal computers are a commodity business but Apple hasn't abandoned the Mac (yet).
What leads you to believe that GE was ever innovating in the lighting space?
...after Edison, I mean.
AFAIK GE’s lighting business, from the start, has just been riding on the fact that (incandescent, halogen, and even fluorescent) lightbulbs were both fragile and required nasty chemicals to make, and so a large company like GE can get better economies of scale on production than their smaller competitors—by either having large contracts with channel partners, or by just vertically integrating all the way down to mining and all the way up to distribution logistics.
