The word he's describing is called "enshittification".
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Enshittification has nothing to do with pricing.
It's about market capture and the resulting lack of choices allowing market holders to maximize profits by degrading product performance. This can occur even when the product has no price.
That's part of enshittification. Step 2 of enshittification is to entice in business buyers with low prices and changes that meet their needs. Step 3 is to cut costs and start price gouging to maximize profits.
Google is free to use. It still is. There is no price.
Facrbook, fee to use. Still is.
Both have been enshittified. There is no price being gouged.
The services they do sell are to advertisers, those costs are not being cut, they are focused on improving their targeting to attract more revenue.
Enshittification is a very simply concept; only product quality is measured. There might be price gouging but turn doesn't have to be.
Counterexamples: Netflix without ads, Gamepass, Tinder.
I think the price being gouged by Google and Facebook enshittification is your time being wasted for their own benefit. Your time and attention is what they sell after all.
I'd say that pricing is part of the deal which can get worse. Claiming that it's not enshittification is useless nitpicking, IMHO.
No, it's monopoly capitalism. A certain Mr. Marx from Germany had a few things to say about it.
You could also try to write modular software and use standardized interfaces to prevent vendor lock in. Haha who am i kidding...
Yeah but my boss told me I should use the magic API because it’s a panacea and will solve all of our problems.
The problem (outside of competence and the fact that most people only really understand one tool) is that they're deliberately architected in ways that make it difficult to operate on them the same way. They're not just different function calls; they want you to make completely different assumptions about how to do things.
This is kinda flawed. Most businesses need to recoup their investment, and some upfront costs going away is part of the plan to profitability.
I think this guy is confusing all "software businesses" and fortune 100 tech companies.
Edit: there are ton of businesses that make software, don't become unicorns or make billions, that survive on a product suiting some niche. To say "software companies" take crazy margins is stupid. Big tech is the issue, not software (see linux)
Software dev is still laughably less costly than hardware dev. And when done your cost drops to zero while hardware has the whole supply chain struggle indefinitely. Big (software) tech has profit margins beyond 30% for a reason.
"when done drops to zero".
This isn't true at all. Software ages, you need to make it better to keep up with new shit. This isn't a software issue, it's a big tech/monopoly issue. Youre talking about big tech companies.
Other software exists, it's not just Instagram and tiktok.
make it better to keep up with new shit
Sure, you cannot stick to your mature piece of software but if you're arguing new developments, then compare those to new hardware too. Far more costly and time-intensive prototyping, engineers cost pretty much the same and nowadays you get to develop firm- or software on top of it. You also cannot create low-cost income streams by implementing subscription models (well, some car vendors try but that's big tech too).
Software. Is. Cheap.
Thats because you define software by whatever successful startup comes a unicorn. There are millions of software companies that never make a billion dollars. Theyre still a software company making a product that doesn't become free.
Youre also mixing total cost versus margin. Nobody is saying software is more expensive than hardware