There Are No New Products
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When you look at something from 1988 or '95 or 2003, it might be absolutely ridiculous. It might [have been] a moonshot designed by people who were far smarter than they were sensible, or one that was forgotten by a market that never appreciated what it was. Or it might have been an incredibly dumb idea that never had legs and [that] only made it to market because of executives getting high on their own supply. But the consistent element [was] that people usually were trying to make a product in order to sell it.
When you get to the 2010s, all that goes away.... Every time a product doesn't make sense, it's because it [isn't] supposed to. Nobody makes anything anymore. There haven't been any products in years! The things that actually get produced are side effects: they're byproducts of a process that is not intended to make something you can buy, but to make a business something another business can buy. It's to grant windfalls to three or four executives when their startup gets purchased, who will then walk away from the team and the patents (all of which they created in bad faith), not caring what happens to them afterwards....
[Usually] the technology disappears forever, and eventually, after doing nothing for years, the team gets dissolved and they go off to find new jobs. Just one of thousands of acquisitions--line items on shareholder reports--by some megacorp, or... some other group of liars, who [are] themselves trying to get bought by someone even bigger. But all along... there is never any intent to actually make a product. Just about everything, from the Nest thermostat to Meraki firewalls, was only created with the intent of getting someone to pay way too much money [to buy the company], while the executives walk away and forget what happens to the company....
I would guess that this [scanner mouse] is... no different. I doubt it was ever supposed to really work; I doubt it was ever supposed to make sense; I doubt you were ever really supposed to buy one! But if they didn't put it on Amazon, then it would be too obvious that they were basically fake... essentially just a stockholder scam. That's what all companies are now, but they have to put something out on the market to pretend that they are actually a manufacturer of physical goods....
That's why I stick to earlier eras: when companies made things that may have been terrible, but were actually supposed to be products--not just bait.
Why would you scan things with a... mouse? (HTTPS)
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