That may be true in a literal sense but misses the far more important corollary: low hanging fruit in consumer technology often drives progress in harder domain

That may be true in a literal sense but misses the far more important corollary: low hanging fruit in consumer technology often drives progress in harder domains. Military and academic investment in telecommunications and transistors may have given birth to Silicon Valley and IT as we know it today, but it was massive investment to feed consumer demand that really made harder scientific and engineering problems tractable. The drive for better graphics in gaming fundamentally changed the face of bioinformatics and genetics, finite element analysis and by extension, almost every subfield of mechanical and civil engineering, and many others. The logistics and transportation industries have gone through a quiet technological revolution every decade as economies of scale drove the cost of computers, GPS, and other embedded electronics to the floor. The demand for laptops, mobile phones, and tablets with ever more complex apps and games is responsible for at least a 5-10x change in productivity for my EE and firmware work over the last decade as the sheer scale of work on consumer electronics around the globe drives down the cost of parts and services right as the hardware world is beginning to learn about the benefits of open source.