It's a very common story in industry. You start nimble, and disrupt bloated platforms. Then, as you grow, pressure grows and you also bloat. Then new company comes that brings nimble product and disrupt you.
Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.
You forgot the main source of pressure: you sell off equity in your company in exchange for cash. The buyers are buying the promise of future profits. At first, you still hold the vast majority of the voting rights, but over time you sell more and more and expectations rise and rise.
Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Hence a page full of ads, and no reason to think things will ever change.
I think the fact that Valve is still a private corp is a big part of it, yes. It allows for continued ownership by people who have meaningful beliefs of what it means to do something the Right Way and who run the business accordingly. This isn't to say that private corps are always "good" like that - the temptation to go for easy pickings and enshittify is always there. But some owners at least won't do that for various reasons, while a public company seems to always end up chasing short-term profits above everything else.
Google's original founders still hold the majority of votes.
> Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Amazon's history shows that public shareholders can be very patient with cash being returned to them, or the company ever showing a profit at all. Tesla used to be in the same boat.
Shareholders are very forward looking. They just don't necessarily trust 'visionary managers' not be full of bullshit. Probably rightly so.
>purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
I see this constantly repeated in anti-capitalist/anti-corporate rhetoric, but on the other side, shareholder meetings, finance conferences, financial service talks, no one ever wants this. Maybe the 20 year old stock bros on discord pumping penny stocks, but no serious shareholder of any company with a name you might recognize.
It happens, there are cases of it, but overwhelmingly the vibe is "long term stable profit generation".
If shareholders didn't want it, then they wouldn't appoint (or keep in place) the top management that repeatedly and consistently makes those choices.
Look at the recent Microsoft layoffs. They purged the company of so much tech talent, and tanked morale for basically all the remaining workers. From any kind of long term perspective this is madness. Yet they were rewarded for it by the stock market.
I think it's a mistake to think of these cycles as inevitable, and that it's guaranteed that some small fry will disrupt the current giants. Yes, they may have happened in the past, but large companies are much more cognizant of the cycles of disruption now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Microsoft was a behemoth in the late 80s and they're currently number 2 market cap in the world. Many folks on this board may be too young to remember Netscape's boast of "The Browser is the OS" in the mid 90s - well, Netscape is long gone and Microsoft is still giant. Only 2 years ago you saw pronouncements that OpenAI was going to be the death knell for Google, and it was it seemed to be the kick in the pants that Google needed to get their AI story working. Facebook just basically bought all its nascent competition (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.)
I think disrupting large players will be much harder than it was it the past.
I fully accept the heat death of the universe will eventually take down Microsoft, but I don't think that's what the comment I was responding to was really about.
My point was that this cycle is not a recent thing, but has been present all throughout history. Bell labs fell. The hudson bay company fell. Arthur Andersen fell. All these were much more entrenched than microsoft is today. I'm not suggesting you have to wait for the heat death of the universe.
Don't worry. Our legislators around the world are hard working so this doesn't happen again, protecting us from harmful contents and cementing current industry leaders' position.
Can you imagine a more effective way to incentivise more people to start even more disrupting platforms? Can you image a more effective way to get investors to give money to these upstarts?
It's much easier to get your rabble-rousing startup to threaten disruption (and then be bought up as a precaution), than if you had to actually battle it out in the marketplace to the bitter end.
It's a bad thing for the rest of us, because it means that all those platforms don't actually disrupt anything at the end of the day, and we have to keep eating the same turds.
You get way more of these new platforms popping up. And some of the might not get bought up in time. (And the wealth of the incumbent ain't infinite, so there's a limit to how many they can buy up.)
I think there’s a middle ground between not making any money by not showing ads and plastering half the page with ads in a way that almost renders the product useless. I’m sure this was a result of a long list of promo packets that incrementally kept adding 0.01% increases to the ad impressions.
Just one facet of what we call 'promotion oriented programming' (or promotion oriented design).
Google's promotion guidelines used to include that if you want to get a promotion on a technical track, you have to demonstrate a mastery of complexity. Cue the unnecessary complexity in some projects meant to get the author promoted.
(They might still include that requirement. I don't know. I haven't worked at Google in nearly a decade.)
Google managed to dance the knife edge there for a lot longer than most though. AdWords made so much money in a fairly unobtrusive way, that they were able to scale it out without pissing a lot of people off. That and it was actually even sometimes useful.
They clearly decided to just say "fuck it" though. Sometime after Ruth Porat replaced Patrick Pichette and especially after Sundar took the helm (both happened while I worked there) but most especially in the last 3 years.
Wouldn't it be nice if some companies instead of ramping up ads for revenue passed along the value to consumers? Once they made their money back on the original investments convert to a lifestyle and provide a valuable product without squeezing every penny our of it and in the end killing it. One day maybe.
The problem is who wants to be CEO of that? How many people do you know are simultaneously voracious enough to want to be the CEO of something and also totally chill and down to just have a lifestyle business? How many people do you know would take a salary of $5 million/year and just keep working the same job? Pretty sure almost everyone I know would do that for maybe two years and then quit and retire. Companies doesn't want that. So that leaves us with the kind of people that would take that salary and keep at it. The reason CEOs are different kinds of people from the rest of us is that it stopped being about the money for them a long time ago. It's not not about the money, but after getting enough money for your own lifetime and several other people's, why keep working? Not everyone is cut out for it. Be the change you want to see in the world. Claw your way up to the c-suite and then run the company how you see fit. Just don't let that climb change you so that you no longer want to run it as a lifestyle business.
They did pass on a lot of value to consumers. They used their profits to grow, build Gmail, buy and grow YouTube, build Android.
Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.
Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.
I feel like you'd need a new corporate structure or something, like the way an S-corp is different, but on steroids.
Because I agree, the forced obsession with "growth" at all costs, which seems necessary to operate a public company (at least in this century[1]), is imho the #1 reason why enshittification is unavoidable.
[1] I'd describe nearly all present-day corporations as fixated on quarterly results even at the expense of business viability. Something I truly don't understand is why big companies say, 75 years ago seem to have been so much less that way. If anyone has any theories I'd love to hear them.
People overwhelmingly prefer ad-supported to subscription supported. Google would be a dramatically better service if everyone who used it paid. I really, really, cannot overstate that.
The internet sucks because users feel entitled to everything on it for free. They don't want ads and they don't want to pay subscriptions. uBlock origin, archive.is, and constant complaining about how the content sucks.
The internet is full of children with a naive understanding of how things work. The are so deluded that they even call on companies to simply provide them everything for free if they want to be "successful".
Google has almost $100 billion in cash reserves right now. Big tech together has over $1 trillion in cash - that's in the ballpark of the GDP of the top 20 countries.
The notion that Internet sucks because megacorps have to scrounge for cash doesn't pass the most basic smell test.
Well Google has been a very good example of not giving into that pressure for a very long time. Their landing page remained ad free for decades and their revenue came from sponsored links through ad-words which was a minimally invasive ad strategy which didn't show banners etc.
Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.