However, you are confusing 'what will become available' with 'what consumers will buy when it becomes available'. The author doesn't say nothing 'better' will b

However, you are confusing 'what will become available' with 'what consumers will buy when it becomes available'. The author doesn't say nothing 'better' will become available. He is claiming that consumers may not buy it, because the advantage of the new product over the old one is minimal. He is, in effect, claiming that many more current R&D efforts will, in the near future, turn out to be bad investments. When purchasing a new product, the perceived advantage is always weighed against its additional cost, having to let go of something one 'is familiar with', backward compatability with other possessions that are retained, etc. If the manufacturer does not succeed in convincing consumers that there is something to be gained by 'upgrading', they will not upgrade. Now I concede that, at the moment, you are probably right: lots of new and improved technologies that will hit the markets the next ten years will be perceived as having sufficient advantage (to replace currently owned products) and they will be purchased. However, in the long run, I think there must come a point when the author's argument will turn out to be valid. That's when new technologies just do not offer enough advantage to be profitable in the consumer market. Of course, every technology faces this problem at some point: it reaches a stable end-of-life fase and manufacturers deal with it in various ways. Some old types of CPU, radio's and the lightbulb are interesting case studies. The main question is whether there will come a point when this holds for the majority of technological innovations, in such a way that the consumer market for 'new' products vanishes all across the 'technological' consumer product market.