Comment by safety1st
8 months ago
You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes. But does it really matter?
I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism.
The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them, extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the users hate that part once it kicks in.
Thiel really seems to believe this is a good thing and there's a sense in which he's right: the tech industry has created more gadgets and created (or consumed?) a level of economic activity on par with industrialization itself. We have been introduced to all manner of innovations and conveniences, and the winners at this game have won bigger than anybody else.
But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it once you can't get out, and it's all part of the plan. Again, and again, and again, for more than 40 years now.
That's why once you're done with Thiel, you should read the GNU Manifesto. Richard Stallman identified the basic dynamics here as far back as the 1980s, and started his movement from the perspective of a user of computer systems who didn't want everything to be trapped and enshittified once again. By encouraging programmers to adopt the GNU license he aimed to prevent the rent seeking stage of this process.
Both camps succeeded partially. Thiel's camp succeeded more, especially economically. Which camp you join is up to you when you write a line of code or you use a piece of software. I personally think the world is complicated and there are elements of value in both. Regardless these are the two written works which together will give you the full context about the software industry, how it works, how it got this way, and even why modern life is the way it is.
And then you will see how it is by design for Salesforce to fuck nonprofits because it works. It was in the plan from day one. They knew. They will do it again.
The book Zero to One has pretty questionable economics.
I'm paraphrasing here, it's been a long time, but his thesis is that in a competitive situation life of a company is nasty, brutish and short. And that might be true, but that doesn't mean that life for customers or shareholders or workers is anything like that.
Part of why companies have it so hard in harsh competition is that they have to pay workers well in order to attract them, and they have to offer customers real value for money (if they want to keep getting their money), and companies also have to give decent returns to shareholders.
The 19th century phrase used in public to justify building monopolistic “trusts” was avoiding “ruinous competition”, the nation would be better off with a few big monopolies
And I'm saying that the competition is 'ruinous' for the companies involved, yes. But it's great for workers, customers and shareholders.
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I have no idea what you mean by "questionable economics" here. You seem to be saying that it seems true, but doesn't conform to your values.
The economics are questionable in a moral sense - monopolies are widely considered to be good for the monopoly's shareholders and bad for everyone else.
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No. I'm saying that he's wrong. Competition is great for innovation, workers, customers and shareholders.
The core reason people hate/distrust/discredit economics is because it lays out a lot of solid yet uncomfortable or unfortunate points. People just really really don't want to know that the economic world is just as trying and punishing as the real world.
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> But does it really matter?
I am pretty sure - if his theories works - it would be really good for accumulating even more capital for the shareholders.
And I am also pretty sure it, at least for me, will not matter at all, and it will be really bad for everyone else involved.
> You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes.
The harsh truth: Alienating some free or highly discounted users can be a net win for companies if it allows them to raise their prices for remaining customers.
This is an extreme example, but it happens all the time. The free or discounted years are always angry, justifiably, but dropping the free plan is a common growth phase for companies looking to reduce their support load, server count, and increase their revenue per user.
> But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it
The key word here is “give”. The free plans were always supposed to be a hook for getting people familiar with the platform so they would buy it later or spread the word. Free plans disappear once the market matures because the free plan no longer serves that purpose. They don’t need to spread the word because everyone knows about Slack. It’s a pop culture word, now, not something that needs to be spread around so people talk about it to their bosses.
Makes sense, but that’s not the problem here. They could have given them, say, a month to migrate, or they could raise the price 2×, or they could have handled it in any other way that’s not “you have a week to pay us $50k or your data is gone”.
Yeah but the problem here is the short time alert
I think it's slightly worse. They didn't even have to know from day one. The incentives are such that it's easy to just over time roll into that (local?) optimum.
I find it interesting that this comment got a lot of replies but is still at 1 point. It went negative temporarily.
That means people are downvoting what is essentially a book recommendation. You ignore knowledge and the things that the architects of the modern world say about their work at your own peril, folks.