[MSFT_Edging]

I've been thinking about this too. I'll sometimes run across some part of the Chinese internet where people are creating some niche product to sell on aliexpress. It's less about IP and more about the product. They're inherently short lived and typically evolve past the original idea.

One huge advantage they have is its comparatively dirt cheap to make mistakes and turn another revision. With the tariffs, this more than doubles for the American trying to also make things. When mistakes cost 2-3x, less people are going to take risks. We've been so focused on what we can turn into intellectual property that we lose focus on what we can make.

The benefit of less enforced IP is that designs can be taken and iterated on freely while in the world of strong IP, you get what the company has decided is the product.

So we can observe a low-risk, lowish reward system that rewards continuous improvement over stagnation. I have a bad feeling that we're doubling and tripling down on this to move towards a world where we can only access computing through the narrow lens that the IP holders will allow.