In a lot of ways, I think this is an accurate take. I worked at SES for years, starting at NewSkies Networks (I was there through the SES acquisition when they merged us with Americom), then a second stint at O3b (just before SES fully bought the controlling stake). My take may be a little short-sighted, as I was really young at the time.

The thing that struck me is that they operated more like real-estate investors than tech companies. Geostationary satellite technology had remained largely unchanged for a couple decades, so these companies were engaged in the business of:

- Obtaining real estate (an orbital slot) - Putting a big, expensive, largely commoditized[1] asset on that real estate - Operating that asset as efficiently as possible to achieve a good ROI

This meant that the executives were often stronger at things like financing hundred-million dollar purchasing projects (a huge skill on its own) and running a skeleton technical operations staff (to keep OpEx down), but lacked the foresight to see what the Internet meant for their product relevance.

1: Of course something as technically complex as a spacecraft isn't a commodity, but there was largely no differentiator in what it _did_: receiving, shifting, and re-transmitting analog RF signals, almost always in 36 MHz and 72 MHz wide chunks. You could buy one from Thales, Lockheed, Boeing, etc., but to the operator's customers, they all basically looked the same.