David Zax pushes back against “innovation for innovation’s sake” and, using TV as an example, argues that “technology can sometimes reach an endpoint, beyond which further innovation is largely superfluous”:
“There’s nothing worse than a product that has reached its telos, its design endpoint,” I said in January of last year, responding to a Wall Street Journal report about TV innovation. I was being sarcastic. The television has, by and large, reached the state it needs to be in. We don’t need 3-D televisions, and while we’ll take larger, flatter, and higher-res screens, most of us don’t care to pay a premium for them. There are certainly ways to improve the television, particularly when it comes to content (see “The Gordian Knot of Television”). But the basic idea of the television–a screen that projects an image of something recorded far away–doesn’t need to change.
The Dish 