> Businesses exist to make money by serving customer needs this is both correct and inadequate as a principle. Leaving aside the excessive focus on money and t

> Businesses exist to make money by serving customer needs this is both correct and inadequate as a principle. Leaving aside the excessive focus on money and the convenient blindness around externalities, customer needs are not static but evolving. What fraction of today's customer "needs" existed 10, 100, 1000 years ago? Needs are shaped in collective feedback loops that identify and match "desirable" new facets of consumption with deliverable technologies. That non-linear game is much more complex than identifying and serving true customer needs. While physical tech (hardware) places real world constraints on what can be created (popular culture has a flying car "need" but they are not deliverable), software has almost no such constraints. It is closer to the business nature of movie making or book writing. You use information and code to create an almost entirely pure cultural artifact. That is why people engage in "faster dishwashers". While it is hard to read the mood of the times and engineer a blockbuster movie, it is much easier to work on a more predictably successful sequel. Of course at some point people tire of sequels.