Report: Star Wars toymakers were directed to exclude female characters
This is why I&#x27;m not such a huge fan of &quot;but the market wants it&quot; arguments, at least in our current society. The market has high barriers to entry (only one entity can make a Star Wars film, and very few can make a Star Wars-scale film) and is run by people who, evidently, have no idea what they&#x27;re doing, and are <i>still</i> profitable and have no need to seek maximum profit. Their own jobs and raises are not threatened by the possibility that they could have been ten times more profitable, because there&#x27;s no way for their bosses to know that. Rey action figures aren&#x27;t on the market, so there are simply no numbers for how profitable it would be.<p>Same goes for startups. Given the barriers to entry in the software business, which are low but still very much nonzero (hence the need for VC), and given that VC can&#x27;t fund all the possible ideas that want to enter, what&#x27;s in the market is what non-consumer participants have decided in their wisdom that consumers will probably like. Which may well be very profitable, but is unlikely to maximize profit.<p>Which leads to a simple reply to PG&#x27;s claim, &quot;When you accuse Silicon Valley of x, you&#x27;re implicitly saying x works well, which doesn&#x27;t seem smart if you&#x27;re against x.&quot; No, I&#x27;m implicitly saying that x works rather poorly, because Silicon Valley works rather poorly and is still profitable. It could be much more profitable.