https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/09/its-bette...
Now - you can argue much more effectively that CEO hiring is not very objective, that comp seems to be decoupled from long term performance, and I'll freely grant that Finance doesn't add the societal value equivalent to its slice of the pie. None of these things should be conflated with the continued existence of aristocracy
Okay, there's a market rate. Why is that rate so high? I'm sure we all thought "hell, I could have run HP into the ground for half what they paid Fiorina." Yeah, except you and I aren't in the "potential CEO" club. That club is determined by wealth, birth, and connections, not what the market will bear.
As for aristocracy, where else do you think this ratchet effect leads? It leads directly to a level of inter-generational wealth disparity that is functionally indistinguishable from explicit hereditary peerage.
Because at the time when new a thing is being created, only the creator (if even) understands the purpose of it. So any other external actor who is supposed to measure the output (be it company CEO, or grant commission, etc.) is not equipped to understand why. Were they equipped to understand, they would just commission the work in the first place.
I don't think it's a coincidence that pretty much the exact same thing happened to Kodak:
And this is true in business just as it is in art. You can have a fantastic "good idea", one that is worth billions even if it is executed with only mediocre success. But that doesn't mean you could simply hand that good idea over to someone else and they would succeed with it to the same degree, because there is a very high chance that they just won't "get it". They'll hear the idea and think that you meant something else. Or they'll think some inconsequential aspect of it is the important part while ignoring the truly important part, and so on.
And we see many examples of this in history. We see XEROX looking at a nearly fully executed "good idea" in the form of the Alto and concentrating on temporary, less consequential aspects of it such as the high unit cost of the first generation computers and not seeing the enormous potential (a computer that was so easy to use anybody could use it, and a computer that was so useful that anybody could benefit from having one).
There are always exception on both ends of the spectrum of course.
Your novel adaption analogy isn't exactly apt. You can't test a movie the way you can with business iteration. There are also no metrics to measure a movie's success the way you can measure revenue, customer retention, user usages, etc.
Xerox could have tried to productize the Star for the mass market but it doesn’t seem like a wild claim to say they would have failed and we’d still have waited for the Amiga.
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3/
$3.03 for the Kindle edition! How can I turn that down?
(And yes, I do note the irony of this being an Amazon link.)
If I go to the same amazon.com page via a (USA based) proxy, I get the $3.03 allright.
So it must be some "regional pricing" of sorts.
IMHO sneaky and border line with dishonesty.
Or varying the product so that it is not exactly the same: https://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/lower...
A prime example of regional pricing was, of course, the region code system for DVD movies. And the modern incarnation of this is regional pricing for streaming services such as Netflix, along with trying to stop people from accessing services via VPNs.
BTW, I find it is a huge percent variation. Not sure if it is the outcome of some ML to optimize revenue or some other external (legal or author bound) reason.
Billions upon billions of dollars and entire industries (graphic arts and digital design, ethernet based networking, the home desktop computer, etc.) were built up out of the technologies that Xerox simply left abandoned on the roadside because they were too myopic.