this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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I think it's kinda even worse: they'll take a good product and actively make it worse, so it's not mere indifference to it but active hatred towards the wants of the customers, in contrast to the desires of the Board.
Like why change a perfectly good logo? If it serves its purpose, then leave it alone?! But no, line must go up, and even if changing the logo makes it go down, then oh well...
The thing is it's been like that forever. Good products made by small- to medium-sized businesses have always attracted buyouts where the new owner basically converts the good reputation of the original into money through cutting corners, laying off critical workers, and other strategies that slowly (or quickly) make the product worse. Eventually the formerly good product gets bad enough there's space in the market for an entrepreneur to introduce a new good product, and the cycle repeats.
I think what's different now is, since this has gone on unabated for 70+ years, economic inequality means the people with good ideas for products can't afford to become entrepreneurs anymore. The market openings are there, but the people that made everything so bad now have all the money. So the cycle is broken not by good products staying good, but by bad products having no replacements.
The only way I can think of to break out of that is to not play the game at all - e.g. instead of Windows vs. Mac, make FOSS Linux, and instead of Facebook vs. Reddit, make Lemmy, Mbin, and PieFed. On the other hand, people that already own a house have greater abilities to donate their time to such coding efforts, whereas younger people today... not as much.
Golden parachute time! They can take some time off while figuring out what to fuck up next.