Why Did Big Tech Stop Building Useful Products?

Here's something about the technology industry that I've been thinking about recently. How did we go from this? An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. These are not three separate devices. This is one device. To this. Now for those who are just listening, the first clip was of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone, and the second clip was from a recent Tesla product demo where they showed a Tesla Roadster, and I don't know how else to describe this, but to say doing a rocket powered kickflip over a parked vehicle. So if in the first clip we have Jobs trying to convince the audience that this new product is going to immediately make their lives much better, that second clip can best be described as a circus act. Now if I'm gonna describe this trend, here's the way I would say it. We are seeing more companies that are like Tesla than they are like Steve Jobs, Apple. Companies that are focusing more on inventing the future instead of trying to improve the present. Right? It's not just Tesla doing this. I mean, how much of this have we seen, for example, in the generative AI industry over the last three years where instead of these companies coming out and saying, look at this product that is going to make your life much better, we get the benchmark graphs that no one understands. We get companies humble bragging about how rogue their rogue AI agents are, and the other company will try to outrogue them. Well, ours are even more rogue than yours, and they're doing even more scary things or or the inscrutable math proofs that OpenAI dropped on the math community last month. And the mathematicians were like, hey, that's not how we do math. We don't want this. Who asked for this? It doesn't matter. They're just trying to show you that they're being futuristic. They're not trying to create products that they can convince you will actually make your life better. Why is this trend happening? What does it mean? What should we do about it? I've been asking myself these questions. I think it's an important topic of conversation, so I thought I would jump on the mic real quick here and record a quick episode to give you my thoughts on this. All right. So let's get into it. All right. So our our question here is why are more technology companies today focusing on inventing the future instead of trying to improve the present? I have three explanations that I wanna try on for size. The first explanation actually comes from Corey Doctrow, and this this... It's this idea that these companies wanna be seen as growth companies instead of stable companies. Right? So a growth company is a company that has shown the potential for in the future having some sort of massive growth, whereas a stable company, you know what you're getting. They sell a certain type of …