Confront Fairchilds Own Internal Decision to Deprioritize Complementary Mos After 1963

# Confront Fairchilds Own Internal Deprioritization of the Idea

## 1. What Fairchild Actually Chose to Pursue Instead

Having filed the patent and supported the papers publication, Fairchild itself did not make complementary MOS a near-term commercial priority; the companys own mid-1960s roadmap attention continued to concentrate on single-polarity PMOS and bipolar logic development, where near-term manufacturable products and existing customer relationships already existed. This is not a story of the inventing company failing to recognize its own idea; it is a story of a company making a defensible near-term resource-allocation choice given the cost and speed realities covered earlier in this series.

## 2. Why This Was a Defensible Choice at the Time, Not a Missed Obvious Opportunity

Judged by the information available in the mid-1960s — near-term cost disadvantage, near-term speed disadvantage, and a niche-sized addressable market for the advantage the idea actually delivered — deprioritizing complementary MOS in favor of nearer-term, already-profitable product lines was a reasonable allocation of scarce 1960s engineering and fab capacity, not an obvious missed opportunity that only looks obvious with fifteen years of hindsight. This framing matters because it keeps the dormancy story honest: it was not corporate blindness that caused the gap, it was a rational, continuously-revisited calculation that simply kept landing on the same answer until the underlying inputs changed.