>Again, much of this is market driven.

Agree with this. Which is really the problem with this (from the original post):

>Working people to death to ship any one feature or product is a poor strategy, as it reduces the capacity to ship the next feature or product (burn out, build-up of bad rush practices).

Doing things like that is bad if you intend to still exist in 10 years, unless doing them is necessary in order to still exist in 10 years. Because if you spend the extra time to get it right, and your competitor ships the minute it compiles, by the time your product is on the market a huge chunk of your prospective customers are already locked into a competing ecosystem.

"Take your time and do it right" is Big Company Thinking, because big companies can afford to take a hit in a nascent business unit for a year or two in order to more than gain it back a decade down the road. If you're a startup, you often can't afford it -- even assuming your competitors don't beat you to market, "take your time and do it right" can easily cause you to run out of investment capital before the product is finished.

I don't mean to imply that this is actually a good thing, just point out that these are the incentive structures we're dealing with. Highly competitive markets have a lot going for them, but stability and long-term planning are not among them.

I kind of want to blame the antitrust laws, actually, for being such a catastrophic failure in every direction. On the one hand we have natural monopoly telecommunications companies abusing their control over radio spectrum into control over mobile computing devices and control over last mile wireline service into control over content delivery (classic tying arrangement in both cases), with nary a peep from the antitrust authorities.

On the other hand, we have the things that antitrust nominally does prohibit causing the market to run in the opposite direction from the efficient characteristics of monopolistic markets (i.e. non-duplication of effort). When we have multiple startups working on the same general idea, the natural thing for them to do is to get together into a single unified organization and pool their efforts, but we make that illegal. So then they execute the classic race to the bottom where everyone cuts corners and works unsustainable hours just because the first mover gets the whole pie and so nothing is sacred if it can provide a meaningful competitive advantage.

I think we need to rethink this whole mess. The shadow of antitrust regulation and the possibility of it being enforced is resulting in all of this widespread inefficiency while the almost complete lack of actual antitrust enforcement against anyone who deserves it is not even providing the supposed benefits that all of that inefficiency is supposed to be buying us.

I certainly don't mean to suggest that we don't need something like antitrust -- we can't have AT&T and Microsoft and whatever oligopolies exist in whatever arbitrary industries turning into de facto unaccountable private governing bodies, which is exactly what would happen with nothing (and has happened to greater and lesser extents already), but what we have just isn't doing the job.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any suggestions.