This tracks, reminds me of Cory Doctorow's talk on reverse centaur situation where he gave a nice rundown of the tech market of the past 15+ years.
Do anything and everything to remain in "growth stock" category. Spend money on useless features, on engineers working on those useless features - as long as it will make your company look like it has bright future and space to grow.
> There’s a bit of automation theory jargon that I absolutely adore: “centaurs” and “reverse-centaurs.” A centaur is a human being who is assisted by a machine that does some onerous task (like transcribing 40 hours of podcasts). A reverse-centaur is a machine that is assisted by a human being, who is expected to work at the machine’s pace.
Do anything and everything to remain in "growth stock" category. Spend money on useless features, on engineers working on those useless features - as long as it will make your company look like it has bright future and space to grow.