Pete doesn’t think companies can make Stable products that just work. I mostly agree with him, but not fully.

The problem is that, no matter how much you and I say we would want that sort of thing, there is no incentive for companies to actually do it. Any CEO who suggested doing this sort of thing would be immediately sacked by their board and replaced with someone committed to an ever-expanding user base and perpetually growing recurring revenue, because that is what the investors want.

Very much agree here. Any company that has investors would “move fast and break things”, as Zuckerberg’s saying goes. And if they can’t come up with new “innovations,” they’d copy them. And if they can’t copy them, they’d buy them or the company1.

I’ve been thinking about this endless cycle recently, when I read about Bluesky and their association with crypto-related investments2. If we go that route, it’s pretty much how Enshittification works. Doctorow coined the term, but not the concept, which I think is as old as society and money.

But then there’s this:

I am unconvinced that most of the mass public actually would want this sort of thing and even if they did, we would have to contend with a commercial and financial economy that has figured out a way to keep profits rolling in utterly disconnected from what buyers of their goods and services actually want.

I think this is too US-centric and tech-centric. My counterargument? Bread 🥖.

People love the concept of good old-fashioned bread that comes from bakeries that have been doing the same thing for generations, along with some pastries 🥐 and good coffee ☕️ or tea.

The emojis I used above to emphasize my point? Yeah, those will keep changing, along with the tech companies that keep rolling out their own versions.

Even traditional bakeries adjust and move with what the customers want; that’s true. What was only bread then would be bread and cake tomorrow, and after that they would offer coffee too, etc. But I think the old-fashioned bread would stay.

The US economy is built against this, more or less, with big capital coming from the stock market and investors that always want more more more. Even if a business is profitable and has shown stable growth for decades, they’d still want more. This is human nature on steroids under what we know as capitalism. But travel in Europe, in small villages (or even in the US in small towns that want nothing to do with the hustle of opening a chain), and you’d find these gems.

Stable products that just work could just work, if they weren’t about money and profit - but most of the products we see around us are. You could make a living and stick to something that pays the bills, or even allows you to enjoy your money and save it, without selling out. There are plenty of examples. But then it’s about passion, not about money.

Footnotes

1 : This brings to mind how InvokeAI is now owned by Adobe, something else I was checking on recently (for now, it seems the free product is still around and kicking, but I doubt it will remain this way). There are plenty of such examples.

2 : I’m not sure what this is about. Most of what I see is the fallout in Mastodon. As far as I can tell this is part B or some funding strategy that started with part A, which was pretty much common knowledge back then too, so people being upset now is more of the “well, duh” to me.