alt Hacker News"So why isn't our software 10x better?"
The answer has nothing to do with rationing. When all software is designed to grab the most attention, serve the most adds, collect the most data, deliver the maximum amount of the cheapest content and generally be as exploitive of its users as possible, no amount of rationing or not rationing will effect it.
McMaster Carr, a company worth a little over a billion, sells metal, bolts, casters, and many other industrial bits and bobs. Their website is infinitely better than Amazons. Why? It has nothing to do with rationing and everything to do with trying to actual deliver a good customer experience.
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Ironically, so many modern tech companies are arguably less incentivized to provide a good technology experience than non-tech companies, since the tech company's value/revenue primarily comes from directly exploiting their users for their data and/or attention. Improving the user experience frequently directly reduces their revenue. No amount of free LLM usage can allow a video serving company to both serve ad-free videos and make money from ads in their videos.
Though, maybe the irony only exists because we use the broad term tech company instead of the more generally accurate terms data harvesting company and attention consuming company.
Crucially, McMaster-Carr is a private company, so their customers are the people giving them money for goods and services. As a public company, Amazon's customers are the gamblers on the stock market.
I'm even more cynical; most software from large organisations is bad because it was never designed for the user, it was designed to make the product manager's career advance.
Two factors:
- middle management do not have contact with either customers or shareholders. They report to managers, and only have managers reporting to them. They're insulated from the actual consequences of their decisions.
- the only way to get recognised for promotion is to create change. Any change. Doesn't matter if it's bad (blame can be shifted), it just needs to be noticed.
If a feature of the product hasn't changed for a long time (because it works for the user), it becomes more of a target for changing. If it changed recently, it creates less impact if it changes again, so isn't a good target. So the product becomes worse over time, not better.