> This is the same kind of bullshit I see in academia, where a new technology is promised to replace an old technology that works fine, but now they have a 9 billion dollar valuation!
I am not sure it is bullshit, maybe it's just competition?
Over time, companies within an industry become complacent, cut costs, and decrease quality of service. Somebody (a young idealist perhaps?) comes along and says, hey, we can do better! And because she believes in free markets, it must be that old technology (and indeed newer technology may have marginal benefit) is the culprit, not human greed or laziness or other deadly sin. So she goes, touts, implements and there is some success. However, then the giants will wake up to the threat. They will magically find the way to be more effective, as they always could have been, and they may even grudgingly implement some parts of new technology. And so the margin for the disruptor quickly disappears, and things will return back to the normal state of affairs, where companies can lazily collect fat paychecks for doing the necessary minimum. It's actually win-win for everybody, customers get a small technology/process upgrade, and she is now in the club!
The only minor problem is that this economic model is far from being optimal, but no one really worries about that except academic economists, since no one really knows how to attain the optimal model in the human society anyway.