er technology, while selling only UberTool's services to outsiders.
Why? Because it takes too much human labor to develop computer software and computer hardware, and this labor cannot be automated away as a one-time cost. If the world outside your window has a thousand times as many brains, a 50% productivity boost that only cascades to a 10% and then a 1% additional productivity boost, will not let you win against the world. If your UberTool was itself a mind, if cascades of self-improvement could fully automate away more and more of the intellectual labor performed by the outside world - then it would be a different story. But while the development path wends inexorably through thousands and millions of engineers, and you can't divert that path through an internal computer, you're not likely to pull far ahead of the world. You can just choose between giving your own people a 10% boost, or selling your product on the market to give lots of people a 10% boost.
You can have trade secrets, and sell only your services or products - many companies follow that business plan; any company that doesn't sell its source code does so. But this is just keeping one small advantage to yourself, and adding that as a cherry on top of the technological progress handed you by the outside world. It's not having more technological progress inside than outside.
If you're getting most of your technological progress handed to you - your resources not being sufficient to do it in-house - then you won't be able to apply your private productivity improvements to most of your actual velocity, since most of your actual velocity will come from outside your walls. If you only create 1% of the progress that you use, then a 50% improvement becomes a 0.5% improvement. The domain of potential recursion and potential cascades is much smaller, diminishing k. As if only 1% of the uranium generating your neutrons, were available for chain reactions to be fissioned further.
We don't live in a world that cares intensely about milking every increment of velocity out of scientific progress. A 0.5% improvement is easily lost in the noise. Corporations and universities routinely put obstacles in front of their internal scientists that cost them more than 10% of their potential. This is one of those problems where not everyone is Engelbart (and you can't just rewrite their source code either).
For completeness, I should mention that there are generic obstacles to pulling an UberTool. Warren Buffett has gotten a sustained higher interest rate than the economy at large, and is widely believed to be capable of doing so indefinitely. In principle, the economy could have invested hundreds of billions of dollars as soon as Berkshire Hathaway had a sufficiently long track record to rule out chance. Instead, Berkshire has grown mostly by compound interest. We could live in a world where asset allocations were ordinarily given as a mix of stocks, bonds, real estate, and Berkshire Hathaway. We don't live in that world for a number of reasons: financial advisors not wanting to make themselves appear irrelevant, strange personal preferences on the part of Buffett...
The economy doesn't always do the obvious thing, like flow money into Buffett until his returns approach the average return of the economy. Interest rate differences much higher than 0.5%, on matters that people care about far more intensely than Science, are ignored if they're not presented in exactly the right format to be seized.
And it's not easy for individual scientists or groups to capture the value created by scientific progress. Did Einstein die with 0.1% of the value that he created? Engelbart in particular doesn't seem to have tried to be Bill Gates, at least not as far as I know.
With that in mind - in one sense Engelbart succeeded at a good portion of what he actually set out to do: computer mice did take over the world.
But it was a broad slow cascade that mixed into the usual exponent of economic growth. Not a concentrated fast FOOM. To produce a concentrated FOOM, you've got to be able to swallow a