This is such a bean-counter MBA perspective. It’s tech, if you want real growth, you need moonshot ideas. If you want to just become a GE style dependable divided stock, then fine, but your shareholders aren’t going to triple their wealth again.

Nobody is saying reduce moonshot ideas to zero. There's a difference between "throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks" to having a risk/reward way of prioritizing what to fund. What you're alluding to is the "grow at all costs and find a way to be profitable later" strategy that is prevalent in SV, but tends to not work so well in real economic downturns. Sometimes I think people either forget, or are too young, to remember that the pre-2021 decade+ of near-zero interest rates are a historical anomaly.

Put differently, take a look at the R&D costs of google[1]. Note how, despite a constantly increasing amount of investment, they still derive 80% of their revenue from ads. Granted, some of the R&D will contribute to ads revenue, but it may also be indicative of a moonshot strategy that isn't contributing much in terms of "real growth" in revenue streams.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/507858/alphabet-google-r...

Does a moonshot mean funding a team of 50 without tangible goals for ten years? The original google moonshots leaned heavily on individual engineers producing Herculean results eg gmail.

Imagine you had a factory. During the boom years you hire extra engineers to improve the factory. These engineers busy themselves adding new production lines and creating more complex manufacturing processes to support products. 2 years later you sack the engineers.

You are left with more complex product and extra assembly lines. You aren’t sure which ones you need or are obligated to continue - so you run them all.

Is this meant to be an analogy for software production?

It seems like the crux is here:

You aren’t sure which ones you need or are obligated to continue

This is essentially saying leaders/managers don't know how to prioritize. What much of tech is doing right now is prioritizing by cutting back on the programs that aren't particularly successful. It's the same thing done in manufacturing.