Why Are Tech Companies Sabotaging Themselves--And Users?

 Maybe you've noticed the last few years that Google kinda sucks.  Just about every time you search for something, the top results are going to be sponsored and the results probably aren't as good as they were years earlier.  When I was writing The Swapped Ranger, a gender swap story in the Old West, I needed to look up some things like what Native American tribes lived in west Texas in that time and about what kind of guns were around and stuff like that.  In the old days I probably would have gotten a pretty good answer right away but now it seemed like I had to do a lot more work to find a satisfactory answer.

Maybe you've lost touch with "friends" and even family on Facebook because you hardly ever see their posts--and vice-versa.  I recently ran a test on my Facebook and posted an article about the degradation of Facebook and challenged people to like it.  How many did?  2.

According to random people on Bluesky, Instagram has likewise been getting a lot worse.  And we've all seen how terrible Twitter X has gotten since Musk took it over.  Recently he decreed that porn would be allowed on the site--with a couple of weak caveats.  In response the government of Indonesia said it would shut down X in that country, which caused a flood of Indonesians to migrate to Bluesky.

Getting back to Google, now they're using "AI" to provide instant "answers."  The problem is the answers are quite frequently utter bullshit.  Not surprisingly people have been challenging the machine brain to fool it and it doesn't seem that hard.  Someone(s) got it to recommend glue--yes, GLUE--on pizza if the cheese is falling off your pizza.  Someone(s) else got it to say that you should eat a few small rocks a day.  Rocks!  Maybe put some glue on your rocks?

Meanwhile Microsoft is trying to force a feature called Copilot+ on Windows 11 Users that has "AI" track all your activities.  But don't worry, they aren't going to upload that information so it'll be totally safe!  Uh-huh.  Some reactionaries have begun uninstalling Windows for Linux--so how long until Linux does something terrible?

It seems just about every tech company is making their products worse and worse.  There's an interesting term I wasn't familiar with called "Rot Economy."  Here's a definition from someone's tech newsletter:  

Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.

It seems like basically this is when tech companies degrade products, mostly so they can push ads.  Not surprisingly this is usually done by people who aren't really software engineers or anything like that.

I'd say they're going to kill the golden goose, but that seems difficult when pretty much everyone is doing it.  What can YOU do about it?  Stop using the app or website, basically.  Be like those people dumping Windows for Linux.  That's probably too much effort for a lot of people though.  To me it seems like some are more vulnerable than others.  I mean, how hard is it to make a search engine?  It's pretty basic shit; I mean we've had them in one form or another for 30 years.  There was AltaVista, Yahoo!, and others before Google came along, so how hard would it be for a new one to be created?  There are other social media apps but maybe not the same as Facebook.

A newsletter I got about two weeks ago made some interesting points about the rot that's been going on since at least 2019.  But it also made me think of something else.  Borrowing from the famous Reagan speech, "Is your social media better than it was 15 years ago?"  

I joined Facebook and Twitter in 2009 when I was trying to promote Where You Belong.  The thing is when I think about it, did either site really improve much since then?  I'm sure they added some minor tweaks that might have been good, but I can't really think of a lot of new things they added that I used.  They probably added video and stuff like that but I never really used that much.  So at least to me there hasn't been any significant improvement in all that time.  Thanks to the rot and Elon Musk (the human embodiment of rot) both sites are in some ways worse than back then.

Something that newsletter talked about was tech seeking growth and expanding into new frontiers.  But a lot of those frontiers Big Tech has swung for the fences but at best hit a double or single.  In the last 15 years think of all those "revolutionary" products:  voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, OK Google), Google Glass, smartwatches, virtual reality (the "Metaverse"), and now "AI."  When those products were coming out, there were big promises of how they would change our lives.  Buuuut, Google Glass just caused people to fall down or get hit by cars; voice assistants couldn't understand users or wasted more time than just doing it yourself; smartwatches are good for some things but there's only so much people really want to do with a 2-inch screen; and virtual reality so far is expensive, can cause medical problems, and just looks pretty cheesy.  Even electric cars probably over-promised how much users would save and how much better they were than older models.  As for "AI" there have been a lot of promises about all the great things it will do but so far all it does is pump out wrong answers, mediocre images, and vapid stories.

Those misfires or just meh products are probably helping to fuel the rot as well.  Since most or all of these companies are public, they need to generate profits and growth.  When your ballyhooed product fails or just does OK then it's incentive to try to wring more money from your main product to even the score.  Some like Google and Facebook do like the Borg (or Microsoft) and just assimilate other successful companies to add their distinctiveness to their own.  But how long can they burn through cash on bad ideas and buying up successful ideas?  Meanwhile the rot is only weakening their core products, which ought to leave them vulnerable to competition.

Though tech companies aren't the only ones suffering from rot.  Plenty of big companies have been rotting for decades by outsourcing to other countries for cheaper labor, using cheaper materials, shrinking portions, and so forth.  Meanwhile they'll raise prices more and more.  Boeing is a good example of a company that has significantly rotted, as has become evident from its spate of plane failures and the failure of its Starliner program.  The "Big 3" had plenty of rot going for the latter 30-40 years of the last century.  So there's plenty of rot to go around.