> Employment isn't the goal of an economy. Production is. That is more or less a tautology; it's also not a particularly useful observation - the economy only

> Employment isn't the goal of an economy. Production is. That is more or less a tautology; it's also not a particularly useful observation - the economy only of metrics by which to judge a society. Pretending that only the economy (via wages, stock prices, GDP, or other measurements) is one of the more damaging things to happen to the world over the last ~50 year or so. Which bring me to my main point - did you even read the article? This article wasn't about employment, nor was it about some sort of neo-ludditie anti-technology crusade. It also wasn't claiming anything about the current size of the tech industry. This article was about the popular fallacy - propaganda, really - that the only thing that should matter to a business is "maximizing shareholder value". This has never been any sort of legal requirement, and - as described in the article - since the 70s. Regardless of what anybody's wishful thinking about what the effects of focusing on "maximizing shareholder value ought to be, the de facto results are to allow owners and high-level management to basically steal the wages of most of their workers. It's nothing more than a cheap excuse to justify greed. As the article shows with examples like the old airline industry, extravagant waste can lead to lead very rapid changes when a new competitor notices what's going on and decides to exploit the money being left on the table by the traditional industry by being more efficient (what the tech industry likes to call "disruption"). You may notice that this about a management problem, and is not specific to the software, electronics, manufacturing, IT, or any other industry. The main prediction made in the article is all about how basing your business on such an obvious fallacy is bad business. The airlines were a good example, and like the old airlines, the big IBM-type businesses had better start paying attention to things like customer service (stop treating disrespecting customers) and making high-quality products people actually want to pay for. Failure to do so will simply leave a vacuum where a competor (asia?) will race them to the bottom. The bottom doesn't have much profit in it, when modern technology keeps reducing costs to almost nothing. Now, you do bring up a useful point: there wil always be IT work. Not that this does not necessarily extend to any other kinds of tech work (i.e. software). This is because IT is a trade, and will will always need it for the same reason we will always need plubers. While an interesting topic, the article was about the likely fall of the big industry player.