Fortune Magazine and an unfortunate number of other publications have reported on phenomenon called "Licking the Cookie" at Microsoft. You know, practice of claiming ownership of a project and therefore preventing anyone else from actually working on it. Just like when you were a kid and your younger sister licked the last cookie on the plate to keep you from eating it.
The image is hard to get out of my head and now I see the same phenomenon everywhere. What is it that compels people to get in the way of a problem, just so that one day, if they ever get around to it, they could take a swing at solving it? Owning unsolved perpetual problems does not seem like the most logical way to advance or otherwise gain job security.
This dynamic does enter the logical universe when the cookie licker also owns whatever would be replaced when the problem is solved. The guy in charge of a multi-year CRM implementation would most certainly throw sand in the gears of any conversation with Salesforce.com. Better yet, he could lick the Salesforce.com cookie and make sure its evaluation never ever sees the light of day.
Entrenched interests are doing this everywhere. Most visible to me is the movie industry trying to prevent a free and open internet and drafting behind them are the television and cable people. Every once in a while a bright light shines out from one of the big auto makers, but for the most part they are sitting heavily on alternative fuel vehicles.
We are very lucky here in the US because we have a vibrant start up ecosystem that will gladly run around the ends of the big fat cookie lickers. Not so much in other economies. So thank you Google for turning the newspaper industry up side down and go Tesla!