westld

Posting this because of this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12217170

The idea that a big company could try to get smaller competitors to churn technically by constantly disrupting the tech ecosystem was discussed by Joel Spolsky in 2002. It may always have been a bizarre conspiracy theory (and some of Joel's to technical calls in that article were wrong), but it could be accurate. It certainly could have been influential when written.

This "conspiracy theory" has been around for long enough, and was discussed by Joel in 2002 in his "Fire and Motion"'article:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

The idea that big companies keep throwing out new technologies to keep little companies churning, even if it didn't exist when Joel wrote about it, could have been adopted after. Of course, some of his calls were wrong in that article, but that's a different discussion.