Old-timers who date back to when Joel Spolsky's early musings on the business of software development were fixtures on the HN front page will remember him using the phrase "fire and motion" for Microsoft's old strategy of constantly making changes so that everyone trying to keep up was—like the Red Queen—running as fast as they could but not getting anywhere.

> Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward?

> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP.

—Joel Spolsky, "Fire and Motion," 2002

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/