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I still don’t understand the enshittification model.
There are plenty of reasons to degrade your user experience. Increasing revenue through ads or merch or predatory monetization. Decreasing costs by cutting complicated features and tech support. But the central examples of enshittification aren’t doing those things. They’re paying more to add features that people don’t want. To adopt patterns that don’t seem like they should make more money.
I mean, maybe I’m just wrong. Maybe spamming AI news articles on the lock screen really does get more people to buy Windows. But…why? How?
A couple of causes. The first, that ThomasdelVasto gets at, is that you as a manager have developers, you have a domain space in the business, and you need to generate an endless stream of work to justify the continued existence of your position and the positions of your direct reports. When all you own is a hammer, you are very incentivized to find an endless world of nails.
The other is that top level leadership across tech currently has no vision, and when leadership doesn't have vision they instead default to bullet point lists of "stuff". This cycle repeats itself endlessly, a company is created to solve some problem (like JIRA/Kanban apps all sucking), succeeds (like trello), loses it's divine spark (built the thing, was successful enough to get bought out by Atlassian), and succumbs to endless feature bloat just like all of its predecessors. The "stuff" lists are also how vendor software, security practices, etc are generally decided. A committee of mixed interests will always go with the vendor that meets the most bullet points on your list, regardless of the product's performance, intuitiveness, or other soft metrics that can't be meaningfully added to a checklist.
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Feature bloat is for internal management and employees to make themselves look good to higher ups, and get promoted.
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