If you want to make money, you should never invent new things - Just copy existing things and improve upon them.
That's why our society has such a short-term focus.
The brightest software engineers these days are writing essentially the same software over and over again (with very slight modifications).
I think the same can be said of almost any industry - All our intelligence and energy is spent on competing with each other and then using marketing/advertising to leverage tiny advantages in a product/service in order to win over disproportionate amounts of customers.
I think the reason why it takes years for disruptive innovations to get noticed is because marketing (and by extension, the media) is paid for by 'today money'.
Marketers don't take bets based on future prospects - They don't need to because there is so much financial incentive for them to stay in the present.
I think you're rather short-selling incremental improvements. Very few of the things that makes our lives so much better than those of our ancestors, are nearly infinitely long strings of incremental improvements.
A present-day smartphone is obviously very, very different from Bell's first telephone, but on the other hand, there wasn't really a clear disruptive discontinuity anywhere along the string.
Uhh, hand-off between cell sites is clearly disruptive discontinuity. You can link this to the invention of radio well after telegraphs / telephones. But, radio is very much it's own thing.
What makes it seem like a smooth transition is the length of time it takes to get to consumer products plus the need to seem like prior products. Internal combustion engines where around for a log time before being refined enough for portable power. But, heat engines are very much their own thing. Similarly battery's and capacitors are their own things. However, when you get a car it's got a huge range of such disruptions packaged into one thing.
This makes some sense. An exciting new thing that sort of works has a limited appeal. A highly polished and optimized thing that works flawlessly and is cheap to produce can and likely will have hundreds of millions of happy users. Figure where the most money is.
"Inventing new things" usually is a series of incremental changes. The Wrights didn't just sit down and build an aircraft. They built large kites, then unmanned gliders, then manned gliders, then added power.
That's why our society has such a short-term focus.
The brightest software engineers these days are writing essentially the same software over and over again (with very slight modifications).
I think the same can be said of almost any industry - All our intelligence and energy is spent on competing with each other and then using marketing/advertising to leverage tiny advantages in a product/service in order to win over disproportionate amounts of customers.
I think the reason why it takes years for disruptive innovations to get noticed is because marketing (and by extension, the media) is paid for by 'today money'.
Marketers don't take bets based on future prospects - They don't need to because there is so much financial incentive for them to stay in the present.