Sadly true. Information that could be conveyed directly in a paragraph or two is dragged out to create a long and often dull narrative, usually without any points of reference. Condom designs don't change every year? Neither do penises. Medical gloves (whose technology derives from condom manufacturing) haven't changed much for decades either. Infection risks are mitigated with antimicrobial coatings and double-gloving. The basic problem is that condoms work well enough for most people and so there isn't that much economic incentive to launch different kinds, even before you consider the regulatory factors.

> Condom designs don't change every year? Neither do penises.

This misses the point by a mile. Particularly for someone complaining about the article having too much unnecessary information, it's bizarre that you missed the ~3 paragraphs following this that describe _why_ it's a problem that they haven't changed: low rates of satisfaction and usage for something that has considerable public health implications (particularly in the developing world).

> Medical gloves (whose technology derives from condom manufacturing) haven't changed much for decades either.

....and if more than 50% of doctors weren't using medical gloves (regulation aside) due to evidently significant issues with comfort and convenience, this would be a cause for complaint too.

> The basic problem is that condoms work well enough for most people and so there isn't that much economic incentive to launch different kinds

This is a particularly ignorant claim, even if you hadn't read the article. Low rates of condom use in situations where they're extremely important is something that any informed person is aware of (again, this is most dramatically true for things like AIDS crises in developing countries like many in Sub-Saharan Africa). As the article establishes, usage isn't great even in the developing world:

"5 percent of men and 63 percent of women who’d most recently had sex with a “new acquaintance” hadn’t used a condom. More alarmingly, 75 percent of women who weren’t using a back-up birth control method reported not using a condom the last time they’d had sex. Adults who’d had anal sex in the past year—the highest-risk sexual act with regard to HIV transmission—said they’d used condoms only 20 percent of the time."

It should go without saying that economic incentives aren't a panacea for reaching global optima: Sometimes you end up in local optima, as in this case where the risk of doing research to potentially tap into the vast market of non-condom users may not be worth it. That's not to mention the systematic under-emphasis that economic incentives have on externalities, as in this case where the public health effects of more universal condom usage wouldn't all be captured by condom manufacturers.

I'm aware of all those things. But you're assuming that people are desperate to adopt something other than existing condoms, eg in Africa. They won't, on past form. Education efforts yield a better return than any putative new condom technology.

I'm not saying they're perfect, by any means. But when you get down to it, they're not hard to use and have a high success rate when used properly. Governments and aid agencies already substantially subsidize the distribution of condoms, which subsidies should easily be enough to offset the non-capture of positive externalities by manufacturers (as if the positive externality of repeat demand due to people living longer healthier lives were not sufficient incentive).

The biggest failure in managing the spread of AIDS in Africa has not been the ongoing deficiency of condoms but the apparently completely wasted expenditure of $1.3 billion in aid monies spent on promoting sexual abstinence instead of harm reduction over the last 15 years: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/health/american-hiv-battle...

We spent over a dollar on every person in Africa to tell them we don't think they should be having sex, in defiance of all the evidence about the inefficacy of such programs, so as to satisfy a small political faction of religious extremists who also support things like instituting the death penalty for homosexuality (https://www.academia.edu/1053858/Locating_Neocolonialism_Tra... ); meanwhile suspending other kinds of educational programs. And then we look at the low rates for condom use and we conclude that the deficiency is with the condoms? Please.

Could we and should we be working to improve condoms? Of course. Are such improvements subject to the law of diminishing returns? Also, of course. You're just not going to get paradigm shifting results through busywork, any more than you're going to get order-of-magnitude improvements in wheel design. A condom is always going to be basically an elastic tube that's closed on one end, just as a wheel is always going to be a circular structure that rotates around a central axle.

I feel for the guy in the article who got unlucky and contracted HIV, but when he's talking about people iterating on things like salt, pepper, and olive oil every year - no they're not. They market it slightly differently, the basic product has seen very little change in thousands of years - much like condoms. Unless we discover drugs that are cheap and have a broad-spectrum prophylactic effect against STDs and pregnancy, we have to be realistic about the prospect of small incremental improvements rather than great leaps forward in this area.