Just my two cents but as others have said, not being publically traded helps a lot. The focus on short term benefits that come with shareholders stops “master plans” when they come with mistakes. Learning from relative failures, like the steam controller and the like, ultimately contributes to major successes like the steam deck. Being able to stay committed to improving the software experience over time, instead of killing the product when it didn’t immediately succeed, is fairly rare in the tech industry. And in all honesty, it would be better if they released a polished profuct, but being committed to it made it a success.
I feel like the pressure to have a majorly successful product day one means that smaller companies can’t innovate the way they want to, so they have to find other ways to produce revenue. Huge companies, like Apple can afford to do both but still stumble, like with the vision pro. Maybe it’ll be a success, but for now its not great and iteration makes it more difficult to maintain the original vision.
Very specific weird fear:
One time, when I was a kid, I was on a road trip and we stopped at a McDonalds for some food and to use the bathroom. I went into the bathroom and the floor, walls and ceiling all had the same tile covering them. I don’t know why, but when the door closed, I was so fucking terrified I made it halfway to the toilet and then turned around and ran out. It was such a strange experience and I have no idea why it got to me that bad.