isn't even that good at UX/UI or design

Open source projects don't excel at it either, it took GNOME 20 years to stop looking frozen since the 90s. KDE is a toggle and checkmark mess.

Only the users know how to cater themselves, AOSP derivatives, UNIX/Linux rice, seasoned designers copylefting/giving away typefaces and assets, orgs advocating and implementing accessibility options in video games, etc, etc.

As you can see from my original comment, I’m no knee-jerk defender of private sector innovation, but I don’t think I agree with this. I love open source software, but the UI is often clunky and unintuitive, like Gimp or LibreOffice. Even when it’s good, it’s often because it mimics the major commercial software.

The heuristic I have is, when the end result benefits from communal information sharing, public is hands down better than private. We have an opioid crisis today because privatized proprietary medical research didn’t receive the same scrutiny from the scientific community as public research. Science and secrecy are incompatible.

But when the end result benefits from a small group of opinionated people getting their way, private can sometimes be better. And good design is more like the latter.

Yes I noticed that too about the tech layoffs. Especially nowadays, corporations seem extremely uninterested in competing to make newer better products.

I think maybe we mean the same thing when you say “Private sector is very good at operationalizing existing technology”. The Nintendo Switch was never a technological marvel, even when it was first released. It’s an attractively assembled collection of other people’s technology. The Switch is “innovative” in a way, mostly in functional product design, but it’s not science.

There is truth but also some corporate myth making here. The main elements of the modern GUI was presented during the so-called Mother of all demos by Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart would later work at Parc to make working prototypes of his ideas he already developed at the Stanford Research Institute. Now the corporate side of the history dominates the story. Same with Ethernet, which was an extension of a researcher’s dissertation work. This sort of corporate historical revisionism is exactly what I’m addressing.

The RCA story is really interesting. Technology Connections has a video on it.

I'm not sure it's fair to say that they couldn't afford it, but they couldn't afford undirected research.

Typically, universities own the patents to any ideas developed using university resources, including the research work one does as a professor. The university can also give a cut to professors.

Bell labs was a real outlier.

It was funded by a regulated monopoly, with the government saying that a percentage of all profits had to go to R&D. They were not even allowed to give Unix to anyone other than universities, let alone profit of it.

These are all so old that I think it supports the point. A lot of today's useful materials, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals were invented by corporations around that time, but in recent history, corporate labs have been gutted and cherry pick out of universities.

E.g. in recent history, AlexNet came out of utoronto, Google bought Alex's startup shortly after, and then Google started developing deep learning models.