But when everybody and their grandma already has an audio setup of some sort that makes them happy enough, and if those cash cow patents you were able to rely on for decades keep expiring on you, you've got little choice but to invent a new problem and market it to people until they begin to jones for the solution you have to offer. How else would you keep growing an already saturated market and pacify your board and shareholders?
I couldn't do those execs' jobs for any money in the world. I can't stand up there on some stage and present the product of multiple years and millions of Dollars of r'n'd as "the next big thing" if it doesn't solve an actual problem. If I ran Apple, the next iPhone presentation would conclude with "…and this is the all-new iPhone 15: It's fast, it's nifty, and it's shiny. But unless you're still sporting an iPhone 8, you shouldn't bother with actually getting one. Thanks to all the digital post processing techniques that we had to come up with to give you a reason to upgrade, the photos it takes are actually worse than what you get from your iPhone 12. All that spacial sound stuff doesn't really work all that well to begin with, and everything else in it that's 'new and improved' is really just a slight spec bump anyway. What you've got in your pocket right now is already more than good enough for what you do with it, so I'd say that you should rather take that money and invest it into a memorable weekend with your loved ones instead."
Something tells me their board and shareholders probably wouldn't keep me around for very long.
And I'm not even kidding in my defense of how these things tend to work, as cynical and ironic the above may sound. It's simply just the way the system that we've picked for ourselves happens to work best. Worse, you can't even blame this on some real or imagined greed of some Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or DC "elite" — because whether we want to accept or even just realize this or not, we all depend and rely on this kind of constant, artificially created growth for our very own standard of living. Without it, the dividends that make your 401(k)s work wouldn't exist. There would be no gain in revenue that could pay for your raise. There wouldn't be the kind of competitive pressure that leads to a world-class system of colleges, entertainment industry, or service industry.
In other words:
When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Do I like this? No, of course not. And for the most part, I choose to not really partake in this unending rat race up this constantly inclining slope of "prescribed improvement." But at the same time, I have to sincerely hope that I remain part of a vanishingly small minority with how I think and act in this regard, as I am under no illusion that it is anything other than the ever-jonesing masses that enable my lifestyle in the first place. Because when your system relies on constant growth, there really are just two general directions you can take: Either you keep inventing solutions for problems that don't actually exist, or you have to periodically destroy everything and make people start over from scratch.
Personally, I prefer the former. Because short of coming up with an entirely different economic and sociopolitical system, everything else we've already tried turned out to be worse.
Edit:
Plus, frustratingly bad or silly products or wannabe-standards occasionally motivate someone to create a much more sane and actually usable competing product or standard. So there's that, too.
