Comment by yakak

It seems to me like this relates to how much emphasis there is on competition monopolizing the entire market and eliminating less efficient solutions. In the 1980s it seemed like every quirky solution would kind of survive, maybe being too bulky and too expensive (to fabricate) but not licensing X, Y or Z for an exorbitant price.. That greatly added complexity but meant redundancies.

In the current form, I feel like the highest efficiency solution maker (or maybe the one in second place) is usually trying to do extremely low licensing with the idea of winning the whole market. That's great in terms of efficiency and actually lowers complexity but means monoculture with exactly identical dependencies.