Specifically, consumers don’t want to work, and don’t really care about being productive.

This reality about the consumer market is a lesson that Silicon Valley has to re-learn every decade or so. Consider Dropbox, whose founder, Drew Houston, is in the process of stepping down. Dropbox was a category-defining product that had a viral hook — if someone signed up with your referral code, you got more storage — and grew extremely fast amongst consumers; the company then spent too long trying to actually build a business in the consumer space, before finally realizing that the only way to make money with what was ultimately a productivity product was by selling to enterprise.

Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

This is the pattern. Acquisition. Cost optimization. Quality decline. Warranty narrowing. Brand equity extraction. And eventually, divestiture.

It happened to your backpack. The same playbook is running right now on your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of.

But the pundits have little incentive to test their theories: They make money and gain influence by selling books. The startup accelerators profit by running large cohorts through a power-law funnel, collecting a few outlier successes

This science has only one axiom: If you do what everyone else does, you get what everyone else gets. The Red Queen hypothesis is the closest thing entrepreneurship has to a foundational law.