I think the bean counters get a bad rap for this a bit unfairly. The past century has seen more progress in knowledge and technology than the rest of human history combined. The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical.

Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologies increasingly become cheaply available as services, eg. laundry, food, transportation. That further reduces demand on production, as many can get by with the bare minimum and don't need the highest quality, longest lasting appliances. Software is even more ephemeral and specialized.

Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem.

R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Open source software has even further muddied the waters. Applications have only a limited lifetime before being replicated and becoming free products (this has only been intensified by the introduction of AI), so companies develop services instead.

Technology and knowledge deepening and rapidly becoming more specialized makes the monolithic corporation much less practical, so companies also need to specialize in order to effectively compete. Going too far in the name of efficiency can destroy core competencies, but moving away from the old model was necessary and rational.

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aleph_minus_one 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself?

Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them.

Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit for universities.

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SoftTalker an hour ago | parent [-]

Those fields still develop in-house expertise and world-leadning products. General Electric was cited above, but their turbine engine division is producing the most fuel-efficient, reliable, and lowest TCO aircraft engines there have ever been. The materials science and engineering expertise needed to do this isn't something you can find in a freshly-graduated university student.

Products like jet engines, though, are still those where quality matters. They are so costly that there's room in the finances to deliver it. Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.

	▲	Zak 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts. A part of this is that consumers usually don't have very good information about products like that. I would almost always pay twice as much for an appliance that's going to last three times as long, but I usually can't find a review that's based on a teardown and rebuild or testing to destruction. Aircraft engines are subjected to both.
	▲	com an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not quite; for wide-bodies at least RR pips GE for fuel-efficiency, but there’s not much in it for the latest generation of power plants.

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watwut 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Universities dont do product oriented research. They do more general research. And also, they should not do product oriented research, that is companies role.

And universities research capabilities are being destroyed too right now.