The more I think about organizations the more I they seem to be the key players preventing change to me. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing)
Business says: We had this great idea, now let's freeze everything in time and let's make money of this snapshot forever, because who knows when we'll find gold again.
Entertainment industry likes to do that especially.
Darwinian processes are near-perfectly optimized ... for an extremely local maximum. Once there, they fail to make jumps to much better nearby maxima.
If you look at a somewhat larger scale, where there are better maxima available, then the correct conclusion is that they are absolutely not optimized.
A great example of this is me; I'm pretty amazing; I can move around my environment, make a living to a sufficient degree to cover costs of food and shelter, and somehow even have a fiancée and manage to keep another organism alive & fed. However I'm not an expert at everything, I'm pretty bad at most sporting based things (even compared to other, existing humans; not some theoretical concept of perfection), and I spend about a third of my life doing nothing (sleeping), despite this not necessarily being required (e.g. Dolphins can sleep half their brain at a time, allowing them to avoid this inefficient downtime).
Somewhat related: it was interesting when my kids were born; they both had to be C-sectioned. I asked the obstetrician about it, and yes, bigger heads are becoming more and more common because mother+child no longer just die when they do occur. We really are removing selection pressures!
There's a huge difference between "exploit in the now" and "exploit, but still be viable in a billion+ years".
Von Braun originally proposed reusable boosters, although he had in mind a parachute system with a water splashdown. A recovery system for the Saturn V was considered, but it would have added time to the schedule, and the "man/moon/decade" goal would have been at risk.
I'm not sure you are accepting the basic principle, which is that evolution is not in any way optimization (not that the evolutionary process is not "optimized").
See something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway
Also Giuseppe Longo's work on randomness as a cause of organizational complexity in evolution: http://montevil.theobio.org/en/system/files/articlepdf/Longo...
It's only when the environment changes (rise of mammals post dinosaur-extinction) or the organisms themselves change environment (Darwin's finches) that you get the rapid rates of evolution to find the new optimumm.
Some obvious analogies of these two situations in tech are the rise of the Internet (Microsoft did change, but struggled), and the rise of the smartphone (Apple came from nowhere to a position of dominance).
Mostly because batteries sucked. Small electronics drove most of the research to improve them.
I guess Tesla vehicles are market leading in several ways, but they aren't a generation ahead of what anyone else can do or anything like that.
But sure, no one is out there doing anything other than Tesla.
And I think I am giving credit where credit is due. Battery research made a lot of progress, Tesla used the resulting batteries to make nice electric vehicles. I mean, they have a battery partner and all that jazz.
This is probably true, but it's also deeply heretical for believers in market efficiency.
Sure. Why didn't we have electric cars before tesla? Why didn't Boeing or Lockheed Martin make reusable rockets?
Alan Kay said something[1] recently that has been bouncing around my head for the past few days. He said that many people think darwinian processes (like the economy) optimize. "One my degrees is in molecular biology, and I can tell you, any biologist would say they're absolutely not optimized. The whole point is to fit into some niche in an environment. And if the environment isn't the right kind of environment evolution isn't going to give you something interesting".
In the context of the economy, if there's no innovation, and not enough competition, and no new players entering a market, I don't think its all that surprising that the existing companies might stop reaching to be more efficient.
It seems strange to think that companies would leave money on the table, but in older industries I think this is exactly what happens. The money just requires too much organizational churn for their corporate appetite.
[1] https://youtu.be/DIR6Rmhm3To?t=54m17s