Technology

The answer is that it’s all about “growth”. The fetishization of shareholders has reached its logical conclusion, and now the only value companies have is in growth. Not profit, not stability, not a reliable customer base or a product people will want. The only thing that matters is if you can make your share price increase faster than the interest on a bond (which is pretty high right now).

As you can see, this can't go on indefinitely. And also such unpleasantries are well known after every huge technological revolution. Every time eventually resolved, and not in favor of those on the quick buck train.

It's still not a dead end. The cycle of birth, growth, old age, death, rebirth from the ashes and so on still works. It's only the competitive, evolutionary, "fast" model has been killed - temporarily.

These corporations will still die unless they make themselves effectively part of the state.

BTW, that's what happened in Germany described by Marx, so despite my distaste for marxism, some of its core ideas may be locally applicable with the process we observe.

It's like a worldwide gold rush IMHO, but not even really worldwide. There are plenty of solutions to be developed and sold in developing countries in place of what fits Americans and Europeans and Chinese and so on, but doesn't fit the rest. Markets are not exhausted for everyone. Just for these corporations because they are unable to evolve.

Lacking anything else, big tech went in HARD on this, throwing untold billions at partnerships, acquisitions, and infrastructure.

If only Sun survived till now, I feel they would have good days. What made them fail then would make them more profitable now. They were planning too far ahead probably, and were too careless with actually keeping the company afloat.

My point is that Sun could, unlike these corporations, function as some kind of "the phone company", or "the construction company", etc. Basically what Microsoft pretended to be in the 00s. They were bad with choosing the right kind of hype, but good with having a comprehensive vision of computing. Except that vision and its relation to finances had schizoaffective traits.

Same with DEC.

The point is to show “engagement”, “interest”, which they can then use to promise that down the line huge piles of money will fall out of this pinata.

Well. It's not unprecedented for business opportunities to dry out. It's actually normal. What's more important, the investors supporting that are the dumber kind, and the investors investing in more real things are the smarter kind. So when these crash (for a few years hunger will probably become a real issue not just in developing countries when that happens), those preserving power will tend to be rather insightful people.