"They get worse because they need to keep pleasing new users, new needs, address every edge case."
That is not what enshittification is about, and not who it is about. You don't enshittify to please users, you do it to please shareholders.
That is not what enshittification is about, and not who it is about. You don't enshittify to please users, you do it to please shareholders.
I was thinking more about all the factors that increase product complexity, and it's far from being just about shareholders:
* The more people you add to a company, the more complexity you add because inherently, everyone wants to leave their mark. In the end, some people see themselves grow because they contributed to this or that new feature. Doesn't matter if it's redundant. Doesn't matter if 10 months later you realize it adds nothing. I've unfortunately seen this pattern repeat itself over and over.
* The bigger a company gets, the more it needs to respond to increasingly specific use cases. A salesperson tells you their client needs this. Customer support tells you a portion of your users are asking for that. Either you have enough perspective to say it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't, and you try to please everyone. But it's a huge source of complexity. And I could cite tons of examples from my old company.
And just to be transparent, I am using my blog as a journal, with short posts. I was not expecting that much traffic and I totally understand that it's maybe not as deep as you would expect ^^
Of course he followed it up with a book, so there's that as well if you want a deeper dive, but the essay is fairly comprehensive at least in laying out what he intends by the term.
One is many products start out pleasing most users, but pivots to enterprise customers because of revenue. Thus, the product shifts heavily towards the enterprise use-case of a few customers at the loss of most small-medium users. Getting more users in this enterprise world means making changes to accommodate special needs and that leads to entropy.
Another new need is to hit next quarters revenue targets, so companies find more juice to squeeze somewhere.
Arguably it was a poor choice of word, but some of us would still like to be able to refer to that specific phenomenon.