Judging by how many day to day tech products in my life are buggy, slow or user-hostile there can't be more than 50-100 tech companies actually innovating, right?

E.g. the older ver may well be better, and even what most users want, but pulling off the optics of selling both without damaging the modern variant is difficult if you're not c-level. The internal champion would basically be ending their career with "yeah I messed up the product let's roll back". Also sends a very interesting signal to shareholders and competitors about the direction of the corp.

You can't really map b2b enterprise software tropes onto b2c entertainment products, as ActiBlizz would discover.

It will be interesting as orgs flatten to see what will keep all the remaining "superhuman AI-powered all-in-one" employees from just making their own shop.

If you walk to the kitchen and fry up an egg are you now a master chef? What's the difference between a surgeon and a butcher ...they both cut things?

Most shops never really needed development expertise in-house as there's no shortage of many decent tools equally suitable as code for getting machines to do most business things.

In some ways this is worse because while it's functionally the same black box intermediary as the alternative-to-code tools there's an illusion of control and more sunk cost. Do you want your sales team selling or learning JavaScript churning out goofy knock-offs for a well-solved problem?

I don't think we'll reach this promised land™ until incentives re-align. Treating software as an assembly line was obviously The Wrong Thing judging by the results - problem is how can we ever move to a model that rewards quality perhaps similar to (book) authors and royalties?

Owner-operator SaaS is about as close as you can get but limits you to web and web-adjacent.

So... coding. :P

'Ownership' is taking on those same stresses and responsibilities without any of the potential pay-offs... or at best a marginal rounding error.

It's not surprising that few people want to work as a founder but get compensated like an employee.

> European cultural hostility to business

Is that the real issue? I thought it was that trying to compete in such a stacked market, against the incumbent Usual Suspects who are gorged on "R&D investment" packages makes SF VC look a cakewalk so you just move to the US instead.

Not a hater, though it's fun to run Doom in a browser tab... just can't see any business value in 99% of its ecosystem, especially with the drift away from web (the only niche where it made sense).