There's a lot to your point. Tech companies with barely functioning enterprise software products (or worse, companies that can acquire other companies and their enterprise products) can burn the bridge to the past by de-investing in legacy maintenance (laying off staff and expertise, cutting support), and forcing the existing user base to accept AI-fueled reboots. Buyers are sent back to market and the choice is between Behemoth Who's All in on AI's Latest VaporWareAI or Legacy Software that Works But Is a Sitting Duck.
It's an industry-wide excuse/opportunity to force what was a stagnant commodity enterprise software market back into a new buying cycle with enough face-saving modernization chrome that buyers can make spending justifications.
At best, this will be a de-evolutionary enshittification local minima era followed by a slow rebuild. More likely, the enshittification era will collapse under its own hyperinflated weight when the logrolling bubble pops, and there will be a consolidation of incremental gains, with a few new benefits being added to what would otherwise look on a long term scale as typical linear innovation if it were not for the hype bubble.
Assume for a moment that the code of cost is zero, and the barrier to entry for coding is gone. Furthermore, let's say you don't want to do anything innovative, you just want to clone, so a huge part of your product management burden goes away.
The playing field is now completely level with any and all comers who want to attack Adobe. You now not only have one huge competitor, but the potential for hundreds of other competitors.
How are you going to convince someone that your execution is the one that's going to displace Adobe and steal market share? Why would I invest in your variant rather than one of your competitors?
The logical conclusion of this is that even if Adobe released its source and the theoretical price drops to zero, you're finding yourself at best in the same situation as Linux distro companies in 1999.
Assuming perfect LLM code generation (a huge assumption that is nowhere close to reality), a company built on this is going to replay the same open source dynamics, with additional steps/expense.
First thing to note is that while the pictures are from the 1960s, the article merely says that Ford uses (and has used, for years) these caves to store cars in transit.
The Kansas City Ford plant manufactures more trucks/vans in a day than it can ship to their destinations, and Ford uses almost any surface lot it can rent (including a nearby amusement park's lot in the offseason) to hold cars until they can be transferred by rail or truck--it's very demand-driven. It's completely natural they'd use these caves as well based on their proximity to the rail and interstate transport near the river.
I don't see in the article anything that implies there's a cache of 1960s cars down there gathering limestone dust. That space would quickly be reclaimed for temporary storage of Transit vans awaiting their buyers.
There's a Ford manufacturing plant 3-5 miles from many of Kansas City's limestone caves along the Missouri river. And as the comment-linked video down below shows, these warehouses are vast and even used for commercial businesses. You can play paintball in a cave at Subtropolis.
Not too far away (3-4 hours), the salt mines in Hutchinson, KS store a lot of Hollywood memorabilia.
One big plot point of "The Day After" back in the 1980s was that people sought shelter in the underground caves around Kansas City.
Find a good audiobook version at your local library through Libby or Hoopla. The one I listened to was about 24 hours in length, but shorter at 1.25x.
After every chapter or so, check out the annotated version here and read/skim what you just listened to: http://www.powermobydick.com/
I found it helpful to listen to the language and flow first, then seek out the explanations in the annotations of the old language or the nautical terms.
This made it far more approachable with respect to the jargon. Helped even this native English speaker!
Strong "I drink your milkshake!" vibes from these proposals.
Both of these proposals require political stability we're unlikely to see over 600 or 50,000 years. You have to be thinking some kind of self-sustaining and monumental Pyramids-type project.
I think you will have trouble finding many places that haven't been touched by conflict in 800 years, given anyone lives there. If there's humans, there will be war.
>> $2.50/box today relative to $2.00/box in 2019 represents +25% inflation...so nowhere near purported pre-COVID levels.
Annualized, that is 5.7% inflation. (1.25 increase ^ 0.25 for 4 years elapsed). So not pre-covid levels, but not nominal 25% annual inflation. Still a little over 2x desired annual growth rate.
It's an industry-wide excuse/opportunity to force what was a stagnant commodity enterprise software market back into a new buying cycle with enough face-saving modernization chrome that buyers can make spending justifications.
At best, this will be a de-evolutionary enshittification local minima era followed by a slow rebuild. More likely, the enshittification era will collapse under its own hyperinflated weight when the logrolling bubble pops, and there will be a consolidation of incremental gains, with a few new benefits being added to what would otherwise look on a long term scale as typical linear innovation if it were not for the hype bubble.