The thing is, most industries begin with a short period of super-exponential improvements, most of what happen in the lab before the products even get sold. In just a few years, the industry is mature, and further improvements happen in a much slower rate.
Semiconductor industry is different. Because of economical factors, it couldn't have that super-exponential beginning, and had to slow down for decades of merely exponential growth. (It also may had the biggest rate of mature/immature efficiency we've ever seen - but that's another thing.)
Can you name any of those industries? Because most (if not all) industries and products I know, aside of IT, have none such "super-exponential" improvements at their beginnings, not even exponential ones year over year.
We don't have 100x better cars than in 1950.
Film cameras didn't get x better in their first years -- it was a slow and painful evolution that lasted decades to get to something like the 35mm film and standardized functionality.
We don't have 10x better air-conditioning, watches, guitars, etc.
The only places I can think of where that holds are things like memory, storage, CPUs, GPUs etc -- all IT related. And maybe batteries, though I doubt it.
Film cameras are at the cheap/fast evolving end, so I wouldn't expect to see most of the in lab models documented. Yet, the first released ones were very reliable - I doubt the first prototyped ones were so.
Thermal machines and watches were two examples of products that were slowed down by economical factors. Different economical factors than semiconductors, so they didn't got that the smooth exponential development.
Not really, since nobody prevented any company from coming up with even faster speeds / bigger transistor counts.
The whole coordination was to push the limits.
Not sure which industry would consider ... exponential improvements as "anti-competitive". More likely they would kill to be able to have them too.