Sounds like innovator's dilemma to me. Their current production lines might be too profitable[0], so diverting expansion capacity to a yet unproven technology (to Micron's to-date profit margin requirements) might be too big of a financial hit. Since they're the ones who came up with 4F design, they must hold a ton of patents on the various incremental improvements. At which point, from a purely cynical and utilitarian view, it would make financial sense to let other players polish the remaining 20% and use patent portfolio as a wedge for mid-term technology transfers.

Or in short: "let others figure out the technical complexities and surrounding economics." - Which would make sense from a company that believes they can catch up once the expensive leg of the manufacturing/scaling research has been completed. Whether that bet is good or not, we'll see.

0: Didn't we read a few days ago here that all of 2027 production capacity has been sold out already?

> that does not justify dropping the future innovation

Looks like they have mapped the possible paths and consider it a dead end. The density increase is low compared to the effort to process cost, so they just opted for a simpler process with a similar density at a much lower cost per wafer. They might come back to it at some point - they invented it and have substantial IP investment on it.

Also, there might be some cost of opportunity - the AI bubble is now, so anything that diverts from current extremely profitable product lines is a terrible idea. It’s a bubble and they have the fiduciary duty to suck it until it’s dry.

> They have to explain what they are doing.

They really don't. A public company doesn't even have to provide forward-looking earnings guidance, though many choose to do so for strategic reasons. The only reason to make announcements is if there's some strategic benefit to doing so.