Really? My impressions are exactly opposite. It's always "business first", "yes this tech is cool and all, but not what the users need", getting things out of the door sooner than possible because sales need to have something to sell, etc. Even if companies fail at "doing what the user truly needs", they also fail at letting developers "do what they think is cool".
Totally agree with your point and I think it is also the reason why we today don't have planes that are so fast as the engineers back in the days dreamt of.
Maybe we don't understand the need for it right now, but if we had kept on improving and "wasting money" on improving the speed and finding new materials we might already would have solved space travel.
As the author points out, spending money on bombs were more important and I don't understand how this is a good thing.
