This is a great blog post, but I want to point out that this is not a new idea, just a way to express an old idea using new terms ("pivot", "startups", etc.)
What Scott is trying to express is that, in a capitalist economy, money is the goal. The process of getting money, once technical innovation is subtracted, is called Marketing. The process of doing Marketing is to understand psychology -- given a set of craftable stimuli, how can you influence the ape to swipe her credit card.
Nokia was a paper mill (1865), Suzuki made looms (1910), Mannesmann produced steel tubes (1890), and Berkshire Hathaway did textile manufacturing (1839)
What Scott is trying to express is that, in a capitalist economy, money is the goal. The process of getting money, once technical innovation is subtracted, is called Marketing. The process of doing Marketing is to understand psychology -- given a set of craftable stimuli, how can you influence the ape to swipe her credit card.