The point is not the monopoly. It is that the company gets to the situation where the product development doesn’t affect their bottom line significantly.
@obrhoff I don't know about that, since steve died we've gotten the watch which is very popular and now the visionpro (which I'm still hopeful that they can get right.. but …)
A product that even slightly misses at a company like apple hurts them more than a company like MS where everyone expects a fuckup. So there is this high bar thats probably both external and internal around new products.
Unfortunately I think the „remote work“ and „work from home“ culture contributed a lot to it. It made it totally acceptable to work with people that you won’t meet anyway in reality.
If you're job can be done from home, it can also be done from India.
Thats the reallity we are living now.
If you ever had to do time zone math when scheduling a conference call to dial in with your BlackBerry, you were already distributed 🤷🏻♂️
I think the shift from office-working to home-working has nothing to do with anything, it is just the end of The Modern Era. When there is no steam engine, why should we move over the town to work somewhere else than home? It is not because the office work is not compensated, but because there is no reason to go there.
And yes, we need bigger homes.
Read Alvin Toffler “The Third Wave” (yes, it is an ancient book).
I don’t argue with you, but I am afraid the powers to remove this historical anomaly (just a few hundred years of people working in the office comparing to the thousands of years working more or less from home) are so strong, that we will have to find some relationship building resources elsewhere.
@obrhoff Not exactly true.
Remote work != Remote work in certain time zones.
Our sliver of our company started with a rough policy of you can work anywhere in EU timezones. Other timezones were considered only in exceptional circumstances.
And that's basically true. My coworkers, down under, are basically on a one message and one answer per 24 hours work mode.
Now if I think to our early days, how I interacted with our CTO, he suggesting a way to analyse data, me coming back 30m with the
@obrhoff result, and potentially iterating a couple of times a day to get progress, nope, you will not get with somebody in a time zone +12h away.
On top, you get aspects like knowing the locale (it's hilarious what errors we make about Asians, but also the other way around), and the ugly truth that good Indian IT people are not growing on trees. Plus, some Eastern Europeans are quite competitive on living expenses, sadly, with at least some parts of India.
I believe that outsourcing overseas is orthogonal to this process. Perhaps, because product doesn’t matter any more, cost-cutting on R&R is the only way how to improve the bottom line?
@kkarhan
I kinda thought that, as well.
But then again, the post proper covered it pretty well, and I don't think a caption "Steve Jobs explains enshitification" would add to it significantly.
I, personally, would have added it, and will do so when I redistribute it some time in the future. (I stole it, naturally.) (You can do this, too.) (It's how I get all my memes: "stealing" AltText-less stuff.)
Unless you mean clothing/background, in which case, never mind. 😜
@obrhoff For a fantasy version of this, there is "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett from 2005(!).
Engineers, having invented a new, faster communication, get ousted by the Finance people who then defend their monopoly by all means. While service is degrading more and more, prices continue going up.
@obrhoff The product becomes the byproduct. The purpose of the org is reduced to "preserve the org".
As I wrote in a different thread: that is why the mightiest empire will fall at some point and why the most dominant company will disappear from the market anyway. It's the inherent mortality gene they all carry in themselves.
Spot on… by Steve Jobs.
Interviewers sometimes play dumb to draw out information that some of the audience might need.
Applies to GM and their transition from product driven to marketing driven company in the 1960s-70s.
GM had solid engineering and would try new things, first to turbocharging in 1962 with the Oldmobile F85 and then Corvair, flexible propshaft in the rear transaxled Tempest, fuel injection in 1957, etc.
But those R&D programs cost money. Marketing was cheaper, and the marketers were moving up in the corporation and by the end of the 1960s basically controlled things.
R&D budgets were cut, the different brands were forced to share platforms and then drive-trains and so on.
With new EPA and NHTSA regs the company was struggling to adapt with the new, lower R&D budgets, so corners were cut. Quality declined. New products were copy-pasta from other divisions. Customer satisfaction tanked.
GM saw its market share drop from 50% to 30% in the 1970s, and continue to decline into the 1980s.
It's the same arc whenever marketing and accounting get control of a corporation and they lose focus on product.
@obrhoff I don't know who Google is marketing to, but it sure isn't me. Usually the first time I hear of a Google project is when they're shutting it down.
I guess I can scratch Dart/Flutter off my list of things to look into. It would be foolish to invest my effort when their corporate heart isn't in it.
We're entering a post-product era, where products don't have to work or make a profit, just generate sizzle to make the number go up.
@obrhoff
Fascinating. I certainly don't have the intuition Steve Jobs did. But I arrived at many of the same conclusions as he from a different path.
I call my view the path to mediocrity. Inspired and creative people build an innovative company. It grows from its success, and must thus hire mid-level managers. These move up the line over time, and as the inspired creators retire, often some of these become top level managers.
But they lack the genius and inspiration of the originators.
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