The other key distinction being the number of extra direct and indirect jobs Corpocom creates to sell its product, because its margins on manufacture are so much bigger than Mechacom's it can justify whopping commissions and a really aggressive marketing play...

Sucks to be a production control manager for Mechacom, but life looks a lot rosier if you've a flair for persuading people that they won't get fired for buying Corpocom instead.

Plus the majority of Corpocom's products end up being sold to people who didn't think they needed or wanted Mechacom's anyway. And even if Mechacom doesn't survive, there are jobs in production innovation at Nucom figuring out how the machines will talk to each other when manufacturing a device people thought had no reason to exist two years ago.

We've been a supposedly decade away from eliminating much of our labour requirement for at least a century, but what's actually happened is that most people have more stuff and different job titles these days.