eBooks and digital rentals should cost a fraction of their physical counterparts, but instead they cost more because of
greedconvenience.I was renting a water heater. It had been installed in my house in the early 1980s. And the rental contract had been handed down from home owner to home owner.
But there was never an attempt at maintenance, even upon request I got told “there’s no need, there’s nothing to maintain on it.” but they kept increasing the rental cost year over year “because of inflation”. It had been paid off for decades! What do you mean you need to charge more? What exactly am I paying for? My water heater is just a number in your books. You have zero costs for it!
There was another thread recently about what happened in your life that made you no longer feel like a child. I think for me one of those things was realizing that the price of things has very little to do at all with the cost of creating that thing.
Price = Cost of Materials + (Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man) + Cost of Labor.
It’s Econ 101
“But but but, my yacht collection? 😟”
~ Gabe Newell
Shhhht, you’ll make people angry!
Software gets more expensive over time when you write it like spaghetti coded crap in a “move fast and break things” environment where you build so much technical debt that you can’t touch anything without breaking 5 other things, and suddenly even simple changes take hundreds of developer hours, which you don’t have because half your team is fighting bugs.
Luckily all of our most critical services run on well-developed platforms that get the time and resources they need to be durable and maintainable over time. (biggest /s I’ve ever written)
This is unfortunately true… Tho what is driving the rent seeking isnt tech debt its greed
Fucking Factorio engineers everywhere, I swear.
The word he’s describing is called “enshittification”.
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.
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.
One consequence of monopoly capitalism is businesses pursuing growth in revenue more aggressively than growth in user base.
When the market is saturated, all you can do to pursue growth is to increase unit margin. This eventually leads to production of “fictitious capital” as a stand in for real capital (as paper assets cost virtually nothing to produce).
Das Kapital goes into lengthy detail about this process. Specifically, the “how much does it cost to make a coat” chapter gets into it in (exhaustive) detail.
Enshittification is a feature of capitalism, smartass.
Sure. But it’s a consequence of monopolisation. Once you break up the monopolies, enshittification will no longer be economically viable.
Monopolization becomes inevitable in a capitalist economy since the wealthy are still the ones with power, and they will always seek to increase their wealth by any means necessary.
Even in a heavilly regulated form of capitalism, the wealthy will do everything in their power to slowly strip regulations over a period of time where they think people won’t notice and attempt to move public opinion towards the wealthy class’s benefit via propaganda.
“You’re not talking about Sprite, but about sugary soft drinks” <- that’s you
I have no idea what you’re trying to say here.
I was giving a name to a specific feature of capitalism and you were all “umm actually”-ing me that I’m talking about capitalism.
That’s like:
Me: “I really like this chocolate croissant” You: “Actually, you’re talking about a pastry 🤓”
My point is that you were mixing up cause and effect.
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.
Most businesses need to recoup their investment
The markets jumped 30% this year alone, even in the face of a higher than recently normal interest rate.
The problem isn’t recoupment of losses, it’s an expectation of skyrocketing future growth.
The end result is a lending market chasing unicorns, quarter after quarter, as businesses promising increasingly ludicrous returns to lure those investors in.
Youre describing the fortune 100 tech companies, as I said.
Plenty of smaller startups survived, still develop, support and improve their software very far from everything you’re describing here. Should maintainers be paid less and less as the project ages?
Software shouldn’t get cheaper as it ages. Big tech companies should stop milking monopolies off tax payer funds. It has nothing to do with the cost / lifecycle of software
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.
Use Linux?
FOSS
