&quot;the age of the intelligent networked machine is just beginning&quot;<p>This sounds like pure denial. You don&#x27;t want to face a painful truth, so you create a rationalization. But your sentence could be applied to dozens of other maturing industries, and your sentence would be wrong in every case:<p>In the 1880s: &quot;There are thousands of oil reserves that no one has discovered yet, therefore the field remains wide open to innovators who want to take a risk on a new field.&quot;<p>And yet, after 1880s, the industry consolidated into a single behemoth. Even as late as the early 21st century, wildcatters could still make some money off a hard to reach patch, if prices were high enough. That didn&#x27;t change the fact that all the big profits were held by a few near monopoly powers.<p>In the 1880s: &quot;Much of the country can not yet be reached by train, so this industry is wide open to innovators who want to build new lines.&quot;<p>And yet the train industry consolidated after 1880.<p>1920s: &quot;In automobiles, there are still vast innovations to be made to make brakes reliable, and someone needs to invent an automatic starter, since hand crakes are now dangerous, given the growing size of the engines. And an automatic transmission would be an amazing breakthrough, if anyone can figure out how to do it. The space is wide open for innovators who can solve any of the many problems that remain in the auto industry.&quot;<p>But the auto industry consolidated from that point forward.<p>In the 1980s: &quot;The CPU is a new idea and the path forward for processors is still wide open to innovation.&quot;<p>And yet, Motorola was founded in 1928, Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957, Intel in 1968 and AMD was founded in 1969. The dominant powers for computer processors started a long time ago, the field consolidated when much was still unknown about the ideal strategy for processors.<p>There are industries that clearly have not yet emerged as stable entities with a clear path forward. Genetic engineering is an obvious one. But the software industry is clearly much more consolidated than it was in the past.