Sometimes I’ll run into a baffling issue with a tech product — be it headphones, Google apps like maps or its search features, Apple products, Spotify, other apps, and so on — and when I look for solutions online I sometimes discover this has been an issue for years. Sometimes for many many years.

These tech companies are sometimes ENORMOUS. How is it that these issues persist? Why do some things end up being so inefficient, unintuitive, or clunky? Why do I catch myself saying “oh my dear fucking lord” under my breath so often when I use tech?

Are there no employees who check forums? Does the architecture become so huge and messy that something seemingly simple is actually super hard to fix? Do these companies not have teams that test this stuff?

Why is it so pervasive? And why does some of it seem to be ignored for literal years? Sometimes even a decade!

Is it all due to enshittification? Do they trap us in as users and then stop giving a shit? Or is there more to it than that?

  • Che Banana@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    A corporate analogy/strategy is to block your competition from the market share.

    For example, a company I used to work for would open accounts in non-viable/non-profitable locations so that our competition would not have the chance to get more market share.

    Big corps don’t give a shit if it works or not, as long as they are the biggest they can squeeze out anyone else, so they will launch whatever is trending (meta/threads) and bullshit thier way into another piece of the pie.