You seem to be making the assumption that this is all a zero sum game.
I have to point out the irony that this is a technology based site, focused on software. You know, a sector that isn't nearly as tied to physical resources as other sectors. It's the whole reason our industry exploded, because you can make software and ship it an infinite number of times, allowing you to scale like no other sector can.
But my point is that the economy is a positive sum game. There's always more money to be made through more innovation.
When you treat things as zero sum you make all these bad decisions and focus on the wrong type of growth. It makes you focus on capturing the existing market rather than push to create markets that previously never existed. (Of course there's a bad way to do the latter too. You can make markets against people's will, as we also see today...)
But once you've innovated that first bit, you're in a mature industry, do you do the hard thing and innovate again or do you just stay there slowly becoming irrelevant, or do you optimise what you have and figure out more income sources from the same innovation for even more money?
Take a look at any mature software product, do they try to innovate more, or do they figure out how to put more advertisements into it?
You seem to be making the assumption that this is all a zero sum game.
I have to point out the irony that this is a technology based site, focused on software. You know, a sector that isn't nearly as tied to physical resources as other sectors. It's the whole reason our industry exploded, because you can make software and ship it an infinite number of times, allowing you to scale like no other sector can.
But my point is that the economy is a positive sum game. There's always more money to be made through more innovation.
When you treat things as zero sum you make all these bad decisions and focus on the wrong type of growth. It makes you focus on capturing the existing market rather than push to create markets that previously never existed. (Of course there's a bad way to do the latter too. You can make markets against people's will, as we also see today...)
But once you've innovated that first bit, you're in a mature industry, do you do the hard thing and innovate again or do you just stay there slowly becoming irrelevant, or do you optimise what you have and figure out more income sources from the same innovation for even more money?
Take a look at any mature software product, do they try to innovate more, or do they figure out how to put more advertisements into it?