Thursday, September 28, 2023

Enshittification

Tam discusses several examples and the process of it happening.

Anyone remember Netscape? MySpace? When Yahoo was a dominant search engine? Sooner or later, somebody will stand up an e-commerce business that put the customer first and eat Bezo's lunch.

5 comments:

  1. In computer chip making, there's the everylasting drive to make chips smaller, faster, denser, whatever...until allasudden, you've got nothing but garbage. The words then are 'The yield dropped off the cliff' ...and you can't just dial things back.
    There's also Gresham's Law, first about currencies getting debased in the 1500s...but really it works for everything that people enshitify.

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  2. They'll eat the ground first. No one can make a profit by putting the customer first. The customer is a cost center. "Enshittification" is simply a [small] bag of [a few of the] outward manifestations of financialization, where Doing What It Says On The Sign is no longer a mission, but a cover.

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  3. I never get the actual item I'm searching on Amazon anymore and I can't filter out the crap.

    So I search via Safari and the Amazon results I want pop up. I can compare prices on other sites and make a purchase. Sometimes Amazon is faster delivery, but more expensive. I choose place of purchase based on what is driving my need.

    I understand, that next year, one will have to pay $2.99 monthly to remove advertising from Prime movies and shows. I probably won't renew my memberships.

    Enshittification is working.

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  4. Back when I was a Verizon outside tech, I would tell customers irate about how difficult it was to get their problem actually fixed that they had been "optimized", explaining that almost,but not quite mad enough to fire us was optimal from a cost standpoint.

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  5. Also,MBAs and McKinsey consultants always squeeze the soft spots to get quick results (that's where the bonuses are). The biggest soft spots are people (employees or customers, doesn't matter)and here we are...

    ReplyDelete

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