No longer science fiction.
Real question here: is it possible to walk all this back from the edge with more ethical companies? I’m thinking co-ops, Mondragon corps, union shops, etc. Basically build businesses that have motivations other than deepening the pockets of VC’s and the like, yet have some kind of growth trajectory (or federate with other corps) to gradually subsume the market.
I get that massive funding makes certain things possible, like disrupting the market, or aggressively buying your competitors. And yes, the company charter would have to be bulletproof against hostile takeover, buyouts, and enshitification, in order to go the distance. But is that really all it takes, or am I missing something huge here?
As someone else said, you have to remain 100% private. The second you become publicly traded, that’s it.
Even then, if you want to make a difference in an established industry, you all but require preexisting deep pockets or some extremely disruptive technology that can’t be easily copied.
You then have to remain steadfast in the face of the ridiculous money that will be dangled in front of you to be bought out.
There’s a lot of stars that need to align.
I agree. The environment in which this must function is corrosive to the very idea, hence why I’m asking it openly here. It’s a pretty dense minefield.
I’m no lawyer, but I’ve mused a lot about some kind of legal “dead man switch” that somehow renders the company value-less if it deviated from the intended path. Something built into the company’s charter and founding documents, not unlike some kind of constitution.
I really don’t know if you could.
Having seen OpenAI’s trajectory of becoming a for-profit and not being “Open” in any serious sense of the word, I genuinely think market forces can absolutely pry open any chest they perceive as containing gold.
My personal conclusion is that you genuinely have to deal with human beings. Take federation for instance: we can try to decentralize these things and make an incredibly solid system, but we still depend on people coming to the realization that this is a good idea and adopting it for their personal/professional internet use.
Now I’m wondering if there such a thing as a decentralized private company? I can’t think of anything beyond having subsidiaries in different countries, but that still requires a parent or at least a main point of contact in the form of the owner. So we’re back to humans.
Enshittification is the end result of putting profits above everything. There’s a reason why XJ Cherokees are still running today despite being over 40 years old. Their internals were so simple that even the most mechanically illiterate could work on it with basic tools from the hardware store. Something like that wouldn’t be make it past the pitch meeting today.
Simplicity is certainly a thing, but you shouldn’t forget that there’s quite a bit of survivor’s bias in that statement
The same reason why the childhood treats like Hostess Twinkies and cakes and candy bars don’t taste good anymore. I originally blamed my tastebuds for the change, but now I believe it’s the enshittification of base ingredients, squeezing as much nostalgic goodwill and basic cravings for sugar/fat as possible out of ever-lower quality, cheaper basic materials in the name of profit margins, donations to conservative super PACs, and executive yachts.
I was just reading an article about how candy companies are trying to make GLP-1 (Ozempic) resistant candy that is effectively hyper-addicting and restarts the cycle of addiction.
Incredible how bad capitalism is for society and it’s affect on food processes in order to drive needless profits.
That should be illegal, wtf. Actually evil shit. No wonder people love Superhero movies when real life is filled with supervillains with no end in sight.
It’s because the hot idea in business right now is rental models for everything.
If your business plan doesn’t have a way to lock customers in and force them to keep paying forever, then no investor is going to look at it.
Software is subscription, infrastructure is subscription. Hell, your own data is probably subscription based these days. Buy a car? Bet your ass it has at least 1 subscription service in it.
I understand some of it tbh. Not the cars. A car is one and done, you manufacture it and you don’t NEED to spend much more after the fact to keep the happy new owner happy. There’s no way servers cost as much to run as they want for their cloud services (e.g remote start via app, unlock via app, etc). Sure there are R&D costs and they’re pretty big, but those usually end when a model comes out, so you can divide it by total cars sold to get how much it is per one car. Before Tesla, cars didn’t really get software updates unless there were major issues.
But I’m starting to understand why the software industry adopted the service model. Having worked for multiple companies doing B2B SaaS… The customers just keep asking for new things. Does a meal planning app need to be a subscription service? Probably not. But anything that keeps on adding new features costs a lot of money. Software engineers aren’t cheap.
Of course my view may be skewed because it’s B2B, not software anyone would just download off an app store or website. At my different jobs we’ve had billion dollar companies come and say “we love what you’re doing, we want to keep using it, but you have to do X, Y and Z or our workflow just won’t work and we can’t use it efficiently”.
Also in the world of consumer facing software, nobody wants a big upfront payment, but people are more willing to stomach a small monthly subscription. We could do away with proprietary software altogether, but oftentimes what happens with open source software is that due to lack of funding, devs don’t have enough time to work on things, and they lag behind proprietary offerings. Large software suites like Adobe Premiere are never “finished” and thus neither are the open source alternatives. But Adobe has a ton more engineering resources to throw at improving their product than most open source projects.
TL;DR: Software engineering is expensive. People working open source projects are often doing it in their spare time after the work that actually pays their bills. If you want free and open source software to be competitive to paid subscription software, you gotta set up recurring donations and convince other people to do the same. At least it’ll be forkable, voluntary and democratic, unlike with proprietary software companies.
The problem with the subscription model is that it doesn’t incentivize making improvements. If I buy a piece of software, I’m not going to buy the new version unless they make significant improvements. With a subscription model I have to continue paying for it even if they make no improvements to the software.
The customers just keep asking for new things. Does a meal planning app need to be a subscription service? Probably not. But anything that keeps on adding new features costs a lot of money. Software engineers aren’t cheap.
This is a problem of poor sales and marketing. The sales people should simply charge the customer for the changes that are asked for. Of course neither the sales people nor the customer understand the cost (they think it’s just pushing one button). Sales people tend to have too much influence in a company (like they bring in the money, not the product, and developers are a cost) and they’ll say yes to anything the customer asks for even if the customer may not even care all that much. But hey if this company is offering free software development services, why not take advantage of it?
A service model might make sense in some cases, but oftentimes it does not. Most definitely not in the consumer market, but we see that everywhere now.
Especially with software, it’s a weird world.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s, they were making actual improvements to things like spreadsheets and word processors. Remember when spell check was a separate program you ran after the fact?
I’d say MS Office hit the point of perfectly usable, needs no improvement somewhere around 2003. Even by then, the vast majority of users weren’t aware of or cared about the features they were adding and would soon start strongly wishing Microsoft would quit fucking around with the UI every few years.
Their business model relied on people buying new versions every so often, and then they made a version that was everything anyone would need…so now what? Demand that they just keep paying for it.
Hmm, let’s see, thanks to DEI, corporate America has spent the last 15 years hiring people based on their race instead of their qualifications, and you’re saying everything is starting to fall apart?
Curious.
That take is just lazy and stupid. DEI is about making sure qualified people aren’t overlooked because of bias. Businesses only care about making money, not some imaginary diversity quota that tanked everything. Which is why successful businesses like Costco and Apple voted to keep it. DEI isn’t affirmative action. Try again, but do better this time.
If DEI is what makes companies more successful, why does it have to be enforced? Capitalists are profit maximizers, so if there’s legit talent being overlooked by racist hiring practices, you’d expect someone with enough of a profit motive would go and hire them for cheaper to outdo the competition. Instead, it appears to be a luxury only super-successful companies can afford to maintain because it boosts their image, and everyone else has to be forced to participate.
You clearly have zero understanding of what you are talking about and it shows. Again, DEI doesn’t mandate quotas or force hiring specific people based on race or other. You are either racist, ignorant, or stupid…or all three.
