I like your analysis. I'd like to ignore American Consumer Preferences and talk about engineering examples. Linux/OSS/MySQL: These were seen as toy alternativ

I like your analysis. I'd like to ignore American Consumer Preferences and talk about engineering examples. Linux/OSS/MySQL: These were seen as toy alternatives to the real thing. Linux eventually displaced all the proprietary Unix operating systems. And it still isn't at feature parity with some of those OSes decades later. Same goes for X86 and Arm. High margin stagnant businesses often get consumed by a toy entrant that crosses that inflection point where it does what it needs to do for 20% of price. When the cost of something is less than your margin, you are screwed. On the ACP in regards to vehicles. Americans have been conned into liking low-end vehicles wrapped in a high-end sheen. SUVs are high margin vehicles partially because they are cheap pickup trucks. US auto manufacturers got their asses handed to them imports from Japan, where people did prefer smaller, lighter more efficient vehicles. There was then an effort across all auto companies to change the tastes of US car buyers so that foreign vehicles couldn't compete. # Semantic Scholar links for the paper, "Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention" https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Experimental-evidence-for-tipping-points-in-social-Centola-Becker/6e40cc15bfb37e9958b4a49069a8f852e7632d01 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Experimental-evidence-... https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Supplementary-Materials-for-Experimental-evidence-Centola-Becker/45a79b2370b4a3b0faf8556d6ef3a2a0e5f67762 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Supplementary-Material... ---- Evolution of opinions on social networks in the presence of competing committed groups https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22448238/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22448238/