Why Are All Tech Products Now Shit? [YouTube] [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
And this has a huge impact on trajectory of the majority of businesses. Cause with scale, they become dependent on other experts from Finance, Marketing, Sales, Logistics etc who take over decision making and leadership as firms grow in size.
You can see it in every sector of the economy. Not just Tech. James Cameron, Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson don't end up creating and running a Disney anymore cause the amount of time to specialize in their own field keeps increasing.
Look at Finance. As soon as an org has more than a few offices in different countries they very quickly learn how to take advantage of difference in labor costs, interest rates, forex, corporate tax rates, rent, real estate costs, subsidy differences, regulatory differences etc. Now scale that up 20 offices in 20 countries and the Financial Engineering dept suddenly a huge say in where the story goes.
Replace Finance with other specializations(Marketing, Sales, Supply chain etc) and the same story plays out.
If you want to have influence you need to have skills across specializations, or know specialists who share your values.
As social beings, we are subject to a wide variety of constraints. Why do we keep acting surprised-pikachu when corporations, which aren't, are sociopathic?
The cure would be to balance fiduciary duty against other incentives. This will happen as disillusionment grows, but as it stands it'll be regulation - slow, unsatisfying, static, and disempowered.
Instead I see a future of enshittified products being swiftly replaced by solo motivated people - or small teams. Suddenly we are back to disruption. Instead of "Google sucks, all I can do is complain on my blog" you can say "Google sucks, I made this alternative give it a shot".
Especially since LLMs can code now. We genuinely can get there. Make something in minutes, pull in some of the open data that's out there and things do get really interesting.
For example. Google Maps recently started showing ads when you're driving - ick. What else is out there? OsmAnd is a maps app with high-quality OpenStreetMap data, but (without meaning to offend) its UI is not up to my personal standard. It's certain that with a few weeks of focused effort one could polish its UI and give the world a third solid maps app.
This is Hacker News, we have the skills and the right level of disrespect for the status quo, we can disrupt!
Have you tried https://organicmaps.app/? It has the same data source, but ui is cleaner.
Looks like it has potential based on a quick test at home, will give it a go on the next car trip.
Public companies have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of its shareholders, maximising shareholder value doesn't mean "in the short term by handicapping long term health" as we currently live under from the management/financial class (and capital investors). The concept has been bastardised, i.e. Boeing's management acting the way they did the past decades has not maximised shareholder value, it has extracted value at the cost of the best interests for shareholders in the long term.
Unfortunately there's no easy way to curtail this behaviour that I can see. Even more when everyone's retirement plan requires being part of the financial market game...
As you mentioned, the incentives are not there for actual maximising shareholder value on the long term, we now see these cycles of healthy growing companies being captured by the financial market when going public, after that it's a process of extracting value in detriment of the health of the company long term, sometimes this process is accelerated, sometimes it makes the company languish for decades, and sometimes the company becomes something else that is still profitable but "evil" in most moral frameworks.
There's practical limits here. You're not going to be building your own search engine any time soon that challenges Google's, or even Bing's.
However, if you want to replace Google Photos, you can absolutely do that with Immich or Photoprism. It won't be trivial though: you'll need to build your own server (or create an instance somewhere), do a lot of setup, figure out how to allow access to your server from the internet so your phone app works and your friends can also view photo albums in links you send them, etc. (assuming you want to replicate all these GPhotos features). But it is do-able, and many people have done it with the existing software and guides.
OsmAnd is an interesting project (and not really Free BTW), but it doesn't do important basic things like give real-time traffic updates.
So I think some things are more easily done DIY than others, but as people work on it, more and more things can potentially be done on systems you control yourself.
Yes, this is correct, but your sarcasm is misdirection.
The criticism is how they are attempting to "make a profit". With callousness and indifference. Dark patterns and exploitation. Growth at any and all cost.
What is the value in a rhetorical victory by ignoring the message of "how" to make it about "what"?
It has been very unpleasant getting to know you, ajmurmann.
What we know today as "capitalism" isn't even a pure or strongly-defined form of it. Laissez-faire policy wasn't able to survive without government intervention, so modern capitalism settled on being a moderate form of socialist republic. You cannot have an American economy without government intervention - the diametric comparison of communist economies to "capitalist" ones is a faux-pas that even first-year political science students don't make. Both forms of government rely on both private and socialized wealth, and neither of them can righteously claim direct heritage to the colonial expansionism that made their governments possible in the first place.
The conversation today is asking what the government's role is here. In the wake of Europe's Digital Market Act, it's plainly apparent that America's entrenched lobbyists have been hemming up serious antitrust proceedings for decades. Capitalist countries can and do regularly disagree over how capitalism instantiates itself and controls the conditions of a free market.
However, that's not what I am referring to when I am saying capitalism lifted people out of poverty. We don't have to go that far back. Simply look at any chart of life expectancy, infant mortality or any other indicator of quality of life during Soviet times and after. It starts going up after they got rid of communism. Same in China after it opened itself to market forces and now that Xi is messing with it they growth is running into issues. Every country that has made the jump from low to middle-income country has done so by initially doing cheap, low-value-add manufacturing. At that initial stage everyone is whining about "exploitation" but subsistence farmers are happy to take the factory jobs and over time they wages rise and if the government doe sit right, their kids get better education and eventually the country becomes high-income. Take a look at the Asian tiger states for more recent examples of this. (the big exception are of course tiny tax havens or oil countries which are not reproducible or scalable.). Which country is seeing the biggest growth in Africa? Botswana which took the approach of liberalizing its economy.
Of course, anarcho-capitalism doesn't work either. I agree that the free market must be protected from manipulation by players in that market as well. I am also in favor of wealth-redistribution that avoids dead-weight-loss.
However, none of that changes the fact that trying to do "good" has done incredible amounts of harm directly and indirectly, especially if it involves punishing individuals or groups or trying to suppress the free market.
If an existing company sucks, start a competitor! Their suck is your opportunity
For a while we had people creating nice products that also happened to make very good money. Most things arguably start out trying to make something good.
Im getting a picture of a horse pulling a cart up hill. When at good height to keep moving you don't need the horse anymore?