f 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 as much as possible of the processes driving the FOOM into the FOOM. Otherwise you can't improve those processes and you can't cascade through them and your k goes down. Then your interest rates won't even be as much higher than normal as, say, Warren Buffett's. And there's no grail to be won, only profits to be made: If you have no realistic hope of beating the world, you may as well join it.