Arcan is such a fascinating project that I've never quite managed to get my head around.

It's politics.

The US's corporate problems in the 1980s and early 1990s existed when strong international competition existed.

It began to change with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_U.S.%E2%80%93Japan_Semico... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord.

It was accelerated further with things like anti-circumvention clauses in Free Trade agreements (see Cory Doctrow's recent highlighting of this: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/) and then had more gasoline thrown on the fire in the ZIRP/easy money era post GFC, culminating with the bazooka of stimulus unleashed post-covid.

My best guess is we are now going to witness ~20 years of slow unwind. You can already see signs of this in things like RoW/EM stocks outperforming the S&P, treasury yields diverging from other "safe haven" soverign bonds (e.g. swiss), gold price rising, Europe starting to get serious about addressing the Draghi report's findings, European defence spending increasing, China starting to act like the "adult in the room" wrt the recent Iran/US blow-up etc. Essentially, countries/blocs attempting to re-assert sovereignty that has been willingly diluted over the last ~30 years to mainly America's benefit.

Somewhere else in the comments here, someone else remarked "Individuals perhaps [move to the new models], but not organizations."

That's illustrative. The mechanism by which organizations are forced to update their technology, move to more competitive suppliers, and cut costs is a recession. In one, every business that doesn't do so goes bankrupt, and what's left are the more efficient businesses that have adopted technology effectively.

We haven't had a real recession since 2009. (2020 was an odd case, because it was effectively brought on by government edict and so it actually killed a number of efficient but unlucky sectors while doing nothing to clean out the dead wood in major corporations). The next one is likely to be a doozy, because the economy is filled with bullshit jobs, bullshit corporations, and bullshit products.

Still, the clock is ticking. I don't know of any "new" company that would use Oracle instead of e.g. Postgres or would migrate to it. That's probably why they're pretty desperate to jump onto something new before the old source of income fizzles out.

It pivoted to server market and people who didn't think running linux was professional enough. Workstations were being held afloat by that pivot. Also they were general purpose instead if limiting their workstation market to just one niche.

also docker is an interesting example. bc its so hard to earn money on it being such a deep commodity you can not close source