My personal business model since around 2002 or so has been to try to join disruptive teams within established firms. Before that I was working in early-to-mid

My personal business model since around 2002 or so has been to try to join disruptive teams within established firms. Before that I was working in early-to-middle-stage startups ( but not startups in California ). What I've seen is that you can actually bring something to "market", and the rest of the company will do everything it can to scuttle it. "The rest of the company" is busy keeping the old fires burning. So you don't get buy-in. I've seen people leave relatively no-risk millions on the table to scuttle these things. But the main body of the organization is able to overemphasize risk in a way that leads to scuttling. You'd have to have somebody fighting for the thing full time. Even then, it's not enough. I also won't say it's not that the others simply do not understand what was done. and to be fair, the engineering staff weren't really up to it anyway. When you've adapted to just duct tape fixes, it's hard to embrace a real fix. This, and the people at the coal face of these "products" proved less than capable of deployment. Bluntly, people like having a buggy product or process to charge hours to. it's less work to jigger or abandon any measurement of defect rates and appeal to nostalgia. Management likes having "engineers" actually just doing clerical work because there's then no deployment cost. And frankly, we probably got it all done too cheaply. I'm in the process of abandoning that model and going to work directly for the customer ( not a customer of any of the firms I worked for, of course ). This is a "firm" that's going from having contractors do maintenance to taking it "organic". To quote Walt Kelly - "We has net the enemy, and it is us."