Clearly at some level the capacity for growth is finite, if for no other reason than we live in a finite universe. On a more practical level there are only so many people, who can only make and consume so much, and you can’t add something without removing something else.

Left to itself, this is a natural process of renewal… there are thousands of network architects today when there were none 100 years ago. On the other hand, there are a lot fewer steam train engineers. 😉
Most people do not, I think have a problem with this, they only want the bumps to be smoothed out so the transition is as smooth and painless as possible.

Such is the nature of real “growth” – natural, economic or personal, it is as much a matter of transformation as addition.

But of course the AT&T goon and his ilk are not speaking of real growth, or real transformation. They are much like the agri businesses, where they quite literally are killing your crop so they can sell you a new one and calling it a “new” market.

The truly ironic thing is that people would pay for a truly new product. As I mentioned with my cell phone and the cell companies unwillingness to let it be used as a modem: I would pay good money for that. Instead, the cell company keeps trying to force me to pay a great deal of money for things I have no interest in, and therefore do not buy. Instead the cell providers end up spending more and more trying to capture a smaller and smaller market because they won’t sell me something they have and that I want to buy.

It is almost a type of pathological hyper competitiveness, where a couple of bulls gore themselves to death fighting over a mate, and never actually breed. It is bad for the companies in the long run, though it might possibly be good for the individual executives and their egos in the short term.