The Technostructure insulated firms from competition and manipulated consumers with ease. And it had no place for entrepreneurs. They might run the corner dry cleaner, but entrepreneurs could not run any business that required capital and planning. Galbraith spoke in a tone of resigned superiority, as though reciting obvious facts that other, less-sophisticated sorts were too romantic to face. Unhappily, it is a fiction.
Technical development has long since become the preserve of the scientist and the engineer.
Most of the cheap and simple inventions have, to put it bluntly, been made. Well, that certainly explains Napster. More to the point, Galbraith could not conceive of investors spreading risk capital over numerous companies. If an invention couldn't be self-financed in a garage, he supposed, it needed a research lab in a bureaucratic monopoly. In short, the man got pretty much everything wrong.