I never said it’s Silicon Valley’s fault. It’s the fault of managers emulating Silicon Valley in businesses that lack the underlying growth drivers.

> only common denominator remaining is the underlying economic system

If you ignore the corpus of counterfactuals I mentioned, sure. Blaming the entire economic system is a great way to stop marginal reforms. Perfect is the enemy of the good. (And in this case, it’s not perfection—it’s a utopia borne out of misreading the current economy as well as its history.)

You have my interest: what marginal reforms would prevent a multinational conglomerate from enshittifying lightbulbs? Would you change the management structure? The ownership structure? You’d think an huge institution with the momentum Philips has would be able to resist the kind of “growth hacking” this article is complaining about, but that’s empirically not the case. If you were god for a day how would you restructure Philips Hue? (I’m digging for a heartfelt rant because I really don’t have a good answer here.)

I’d remove sovereignty over the system from Philips. Consider mp3 or Arm. A balance of power. There the balance is between suppliers.

But let’s take the toughest case: you want to launch a system that users can trust long term, but you don’t have peer-level partners. (You also have executive authority at Philips.) First: divide standards writing from your corporate interests. You still want significant influence over the standard. But you want to remove the ability to make further changes unilaterally from your reports and successors. Universities are a natural partner in this; perhaps, also, a consumer-advocacy group. Second: give users clearly-defined and easily-marketed legal rights in respect of their devices.

The first added a public component to a limited section of your architecture. You’re not giving up profit, just control. (And future control, at that.) The second does threaten profits, but only in the long term; you’re leaning into management’s short-term profit incentives in both cases. Finally, to guard against the legal rights being curtailed by a future executive, build in a poison pill: if they’re reduced within certain parameters, certain IP becomes freely licenseable for repairs, et cetera. (I’d also add in engineering representation at the subsidiary’s Board level, perhaps with a separate ESOP package or whatever, but that’s likely more trouble than it’s worth.)

The above recapitulates the history of enlightened despots. Using absolute power to limit successors while giving balancing voices at the table. In Philips case, there was no ecosystem. No third-party developers of note. Users in insufficient numbers and organisation to pressure management. Betting on humans being good for goodness’ sake is a terrible philosophy, irrespective of how they’re organised.

And dare I say, had they done the above and created an ecosystem where they were a major—but not the dominant—player, there is a good chance I’d have their product in my house right now. By choosing a non-aligned model, Philips lost long-term value, both by sacrificing revenue and assuming the entire network’s development cost.