How big technology systems are slowing innovation

Image credit: Amrita Marino. Essay by James Bessen. MIT Technology Review – February 17, 2022.

The great IT revolution is no longer promoting economic dynamism. It’s preventing it.

In 2005, years before Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa came on the scene, two startups—ScanSoft and Nuance Communications—merged to pursue a burgeoning opportunity in speech recognition. The new company developed powerful speech-processing software and grew rapidly for almost a decade—an average of 27% per year in sales. Then suddenly, around 2014, it stopped growing. Revenues in 2019 were roughly the same as revenues in 2013. Nuance had run into strong headwinds, as large computer firms that were once its partners became its competitors. […]

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