My comment was made from the relatively simpler entrepreneurial perspective, not the corporate one. Corp ownership rests with people in the C-suite who are social/political lawyer types, not technical people. They delegate responsibility but not authority, because they can hire people, even smart people, to work under those conditions. This is an error mode where "blame" flows from those who control the money to those who control the technology. Luckily, not all money is stupid so some corps (and some parts of corps) manage to function even in the presence of risk and innovation failures. I mean the whole industry is effectively a distributed R&D budget that may or may not yield fruit. I suppose this is the market figuring out whether iterated R&D makes sense or not. (Based on history, I'd say it makes a lot of sense.)