Whenever I buy a console I'm super aware I have maybe 5 years of using it before I'm forced to upgrade to the next console. It's even worse with phones. I wonder how many of these devices (or realistically, new features existing devices) are held back on purpose to justify a new phone every year.
What is the current rate of technological advancement if we discount capitalism creating a culture where businesses don't put out their best product always, and innovation is not innovation for the sake of itself, or to make people's lives easier, but a tool used to beat out the other guy and keep making money off of people every year?
I can elaborate more on that, honestly it's more of a personal observation than anything else.
In the early 00's it was (anecdotally) possible for scientists and engineers to have a stake in a company they started and then make it big when it goes public or gets bought. On paper that's still technically true, but in practice there's always some shell game that happens to either dilute the value of the shares owned by the actual people working at the startup. Any future funding rounds tend to involve just losing more and more control of the company and the end product.
The entire merger + acquisition process is also corrosive for developing technical experts and actual improvements in technology. It will often get sold internally as "we're going to gain so much market share" or "we're keeping the whole incoming engineering team". More often than not it results in an orphan product getting maintained by people who are multiple steps removed from primary source information on how or why technical decisions were made. Technical improvements tend to cease abruptly, but you'd be surprised how long products can limp along as increasingly distraught supply chain people try to track down single board computers that went end of life in 2007.
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Yes that is entirely the case, I'm pretty sure at all levels. All high-profit companies are scouted by the high finance firms, bought, stripped, and sold, to then deteriorate.
Yeah, and unless you're self-financing or like just taking out loans to pay yourself you're kinda stuck "pitching" to investors.
This is compounded in America by needing to also pay for your coworkers health insurance and retirement at the same time as you're trying to "start up." It can be daunting, and makes the Faustian bargain that is getting investor finance that much harder to justify avoiding.
Also when I say lose control, I mean you're going to start getting increasingly locked in on exclusively the path deemed most profitable. At some point there will invariably be a mass exodus or power struggle and the end result is rarely a functional organization.