I don't know. Aren't there are also plenty of recent successes that owe a lot of their success to good design? This feels like an attempt to slap on a grand nar

I don't know. Aren't there are also plenty of recent successes that owe a lot of their success to good design? This feels like an attempt to slap on a grand narrative when it's really nothing more than "most new products fail". More relevant would be a study of the exceptional cases--successes--to see if there's a correlation with an improving standard of design.