I denigrate the term SaaS. Do any other industries have this weird acronym for what they innovate on? It can even be called nBA if acronyms had to be used for everything( "no Brick Apps")! Imagine how SaaS sounds for somebody not in tech! And how arrogant of Satya to just completely wipe out smartphones as an economic growth engine , his mind is stuck in the 70s! I would say technology has always followed from institutions with heavy funding, who had the time and money to do this kind of innovations. If there is no incentive for those institutions to do those innovations, say, for example DARPA invents a neuralink like machine for helping the soldiers be at peak performance, but turned out it did not really help but hurt them more, they would not do so , and so, the landscape for the tech industry to imitate and develop a prototype off that tech is non-existent. Elon musk tried to change the path away from relying on those institutions, but it is just not practical to do so in terms of time and money for a publicly funded company in the capitalistic RoI hungry stock market. One would argue that even the funding that institutions get is from tax money, but once that money is gone, it is gone, they aint asking for interest and principal on that money! May be it is time for the stock market to adapt and create such an environment where interested public can give away some portion of their money , like crowd funding, and they choose which individual be eligible for using that money to advance innovation, similar to democracy but this time, with peer reviews from experts in the field! This would work for the economic growth as a whole because it is not individualistic but everyone is working towards the goal, similar to what John Nash says in the beautiful mind, the best result comes in a group when everyone does what's best for himself and the group! Adam smith was wrong!
