the unrelenting march of exponential progress is so funny because it means we never actually get any mature technologies anymore. Anyone with the capital to do it is busy in their red queen's race with each other where whenever someone develops something new, everyone drops everything else they're doing to pivot to that and gain parity and start another red queen race.
Because the corps are now big enough that even the slightest market lead lets you devour everyone below you. Ice them out with regulations you lobby for, buy them out, break them legally or through the media. Then buy them out.
so we never get iteration on a design. maybe we get two of the device, three if it's a small enough niche, before someone buys them out or puts them out of business and then moves on to the next thing, unless they're a bigcorp and then they move on even faster than that.
The people at the top asked for innovation and that's all we get now, very little product development, everything's in maintenance mode if it's not the flavor of the quarter. Anyone trying to actually develop a better product there often gets bought out if it's somewhere that's legal to do that, or buried in FUD if it isn't, well before they can make a second iteration after learning from their first. Because if anyone makes something good, all the bigcorps will have to pivot to actually making an up-to-parity version of it or their competitors might get far enough ahead to devour them.
it's a fucking arms race but over like, which VR headset can you trick the most people into buying.
