Tech Companies Are Ruining Their Apps, Websites, Internet
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
(1) FAANG seems to be running out of new ideas. They've collectively turned everything into some kind of feed and frantically reiterated on that trying to squeeze out every penny of it. Some 10 years ago they were searching for "how can we monetize mobile and ads" and now everything seems to look like a nail. Their products all look similar, they're copycatting each others' features and there's barely any "ha, interesting UX idea"-moment anymore.
Also, they're too big to try something new in the small with no or minimal ROI which is especially driven by all of them being public companies with a historically high YoY growth rate. Good news for small disrupting startups. Also for pretty old behemoths who are able to survive hard times like tardigrades (Microsoft) and strategically put themselves into a good waiting position.
(2) The data-driven mindset as a sole strategy seems to be ceasing. To me, this comes without surprise. Having watched product manager work in recent years it looked like mindless and uncreative A/B-testing: "let's push this box 10px to the left and see what happens" and months later "push this box 15px to the right and measure". Data-driven is good, but it does not replace but only augment qualitative product management. Also, "we do design sprints bc Google is doing so" from my perspective often ends in a soulless process where all stakeholders are just doing their thing in order to measure something (anything) systematically cutting out peaks (and lows).
My counter-initiative would be: Can we please make digital products creative, weird, un-commercialized, at least when they're new? Can we again listen more to our guts?
The flip side to that, at FAANG, is "look, we put the start button in the middle! Eh? Eh?" which I'm sure went through traditional design by committee.
To be intentionally vague:
For our product we have taken the “old” ways of doing things and just automated them using automation tools like Ansible AWX. We didn’t try to compete with the firms offering “new web scale 2.0 instant” nonsense, and we use their architectural shortcomings to market our strengths. We losely couple everything we can to achieve flexibility in our product rather than building flexibility as specific features.
It works well for us. Most of our clients left absolutely massive but effectively cookie cutter companies and are much happier. And we make money.
Over the last year i have seen google maps go to complete shit. Maybe it’s just the area but it’s to the point where someone has already likely died because of google telling them to take this path.
Enabled to make purchase decisions, but not on price or quality.
Facebook and Twitter and Google and the rest have all got their users with free cool, dynamic development over the years. They've grown and pushed (and bought) everyone else and they've all sold the vast majority of themselves and everyone involved is insanely rich. The current owners are shareholders.
The people on the hook for these things (looking at you, Musk) are desperately trying to figure out where the monetisation's at. Damn everything else. If they can't turn these money pits into a business, what's the point.
I'm still hopeful there'll be a point in time where we're comfortable paying for services, and that these companies find a way to deliver on that value without making us the product. I'd happily pay $10/mo for search that genuinely trie to find the best results. Same for social media.
I find the drive to make it new is a curse on mobile. Many apps have betrayed me (1Password) or threw away best features (WeatherUnderground) or just lost touch (Transit) when they update their products with new features.
IMHO, if you want to make something ‘new’, then take a page from Hollywood and call it ‘2’ or ‘revenge’.
Interesting a later thread about new hardware and old software seems to have the same problem—companies won’t support old software with only a small fraction of users.
I think this is unfortunately a "natural" progression for companies who focus on growth. In the beginning, they are a small team that has limited resources and is forced to focus on what matters.
Once they grow, they start multiplying the team sizes, introducing new levels of management and hires experienced product and tech people. Often for no other reason that they need to grow, and that means more resources.
The new hires have to justify themselves and need to find work to do. Product people have to make visible changes to signal their worth to upper management, while developers invent new problems to solve so that they rewrite the platform to $current_hype and add complexity and unnecessary scaling.
Ironically, Google now honors quotation marks again (returning zero results, like ddg should), but then it produces pages of “how to use a search engine” drivel, below the “no results found” message.
Would users at least have to find the stuff (whatever it is) acceptable, and a bit more so than other options?