Different incentives. Imagine a programming language team composed of a bunch of world class experts (expensive) worked on an amazing programming language that

Different incentives. Imagine a programming language team composed of a bunch of world class experts (expensive) worked on an amazing programming language that was a joy to use for millions of programmers worldwide and got a lot of academic interest and free work on it in the form of research etc. and they sold some books / support / services / consulting / certification / sponsorship that covered their salaries but did not bring in any more money than that. You and I would be very proud to be the corporation/manager that "owns" such a team, even if they don't make us a lot of money or increase the price of our stock options. But LPOD looks at this and tries to design it into a huge money maker. He realizes he cannot turn it into a long term cash cow like Oracle RDBMS but he can squeeze some profits out of it for a few years until it dies. Some profits is better than no profits. So that's what he does.