Ok, author of blog does not get it. If I make a magic box, then patent it, and then sell the patent, whomever I sell the patent will dominate the box making in

Ok, author of blog does not get it. If I make a magic box, then patent it, and then sell the patent, whomever I sell the patent will dominate the box making industry, since they are the only ones with a magic box. This is what the author thinks is happening, but it is not analogous. If I open a factory for making boxes, and I sit in the front office and monitor my factory, and hire great staff and motivate them to make boxes, and figure out methods and practices that help workers stay alert, motivated and uninjured, and I keep costs way below industry norms, I will have a very profitable box factory. Now, BigBoxMaker wants to buy my factory, since it is so much more efficient than theirs. They pay me $$$$$. I move to ${sunny_place}. They run the factory, but they aren't me, and they shit the place up. All they did was drive me out of the market, and in a few years another industrious soul will come in and they will have to buy their factory too, otherwise, eventually, they will be out of business. Now, the key is eventually. They can afford to pay me what I would profit from running my awesome factory for 15 years, except it only took me 3 years. They require me to stay at BigBoxCompany for 2 years, but I just have to meet benchmarks, which is super easy since I already have the factory working at the level the benchmarks specify. So 2 years of dicking around at BigBoxCompany, doing whatever I feel like, plus a check for the amount I would make if I worked my heart out for the next 10 years, or 10 years sitting in a factory, looking at factory people, dealing with factory problems. Plus, my factory might not be successful in the long run, there is inherent risk of lawsuits, natural disaster, political shinanigans (BigBoxCompany gets your factory rezoned as an old folks home by bribing the governor, or you get EPA inspections every 10 minutes, or they bribe an employee to sabotage your equipment). Finally, you don't have to sit around after you take the check. Perhaps you should open a bag factory (you probably agreed not to compete in Boxes), and you turn that around even faster, since you will of course take all your talented workers with you in 2 years once you are free of BigBoxCompany. If the check is larger than (expected profit without selling out) * (risk factor) - (estimated value of your time doing other things) you MUST take it unless you don't care about maximizing profits, in which case why are you running such a great factory? Obviously the loser is the consumer, but this is always the case. On their way up, companies are models of efficiency (that is why they are moving up, so this is a tautology). At some point they are able to use market position and branding to get customers, and so they can let efficiency slip a little, so of course it does slip. If you were guessing what an executive would do when presented with 2 options, and one option requires 60 hours a week of hard work for 6 months, and one requires a phone call and dicking around and playing golf, and both have the same outcome, which would you expect the executive to make? So of course established companies just advertise and give out free schwag and sponsor events instead of buckling down and making a better product and more cheaply, the executive only cares about profit for the period which effects his compensation, and both methods are identical if that is your only metric.