(1) FAANG seems to be running out of new ideas. They've collectively turned everything into some kind of feed and frantically reiterated on that trying to squeeze out every penny of it. Some 10 years ago they were searching for "how can we monetize mobile and ads" and now everything seems to look like a nail. Their products all look similar, they're copycatting each others' features and there's barely any "ha, interesting UX idea"-moment anymore.
Also, they're too big to try something new in the small with no or minimal ROI which is especially driven by all of them being public companies with a historically high YoY growth rate.
Good news for small disrupting startups. Also for pretty old behemoths who are able to survive hard times like tardigrades (Microsoft) and strategically put themselves into a good waiting position.
(2) The data-driven mindset as a sole strategy seems to be ceasing. To me, this comes without surprise. Having watched product manager work in recent years it looked like mindless and uncreative A/B-testing: "let's push this box 10px to the left and see what happens" and months later "push this box 15px to the right and measure". Data-driven is good, but it does not replace but only augment qualitative product management.
Also, "we do design sprints bc Google is doing so" from my perspective often ends in a soulless process where all stakeholders are just doing their thing in order to measure something (anything) systematically cutting out peaks (and lows).
My counter-initiative would be: Can we please make digital products creative, weird, un-commercialized, at least when they're new? Can we again listen more to our guts?
"Data-driven" the way FAANG does it is just design by committee at scale. It will always converge to the blandest design. No one will have an opinion about it.
The flip side to that, at FAANG, is "look, we put the start button in the middle! Eh? Eh?" which I'm sure went through traditional design by committee.
This is how my business competes, at least partially.
To be intentionally vague:
For our product we have taken the “old” ways of doing things and just automated them using automation tools like Ansible AWX. We didn’t try to compete with the firms offering “new web scale 2.0 instant” nonsense, and we use their architectural shortcomings to market our strengths. We losely couple everything we can to achieve flexibility in our product rather than building flexibility as specific features.
It works well for us. Most of our clients left absolutely massive but effectively cookie cutter companies and are much happier. And we make money.
This is the problem was "endless economic growth". Being profitable is no longer enough. You need to double your share price YOY. This disgusts me and is terrible for society.
Google Maps routinely asks me if the route suggestion was good or not. Google Search never asks if the search results were good or not. Make of it what you will.
I don’t recall ever seeing this. I even tried to let them know that on one highway I normally take they are advising people to take an extremely dangerous road in the middle of blizzards. Actually if you are visiting almost all of the hotels send you directions ahead of time to not take this road.
Over the last year i have seen google maps go to complete shit. Maybe it’s just the area but it’s to the point where someone has already likely died because of google telling them to take this path.
It must be just your area. Google Maps is pretty much indispensable for me, and I haven't seen any regressions in quality. I'm guessing Google Maps has different teams maintaining it in different places, so your experience probably varies a lot by locality.
Google Maps in my city is awful. There are building outlines that overlap a river in one place. It's been like that for at least 3 years. Some street names are clearly auto-imported from somewhere (wikipedia?) because they have emphasis marks on them. It's like they aren't even trying.
They did ask at one time. Around about 2008-ish you could give feedback on individual entries. I’m guessing it got gamed real quick and shut down. It was at the height of “crowdsource all the things” fad.
That's not particularly fair, a lot of companies hired way too many people for big salaries and now they're feeling the pinch. People are getting hired straight out of uni into these inefficient companies that have them do bullshit roles, but it is hard to fault someome for cashing in an absurdly high payslip and doing what they're asked.
I've been reading a book called "Makers and Takers" that's making this stuff make more sense. Everything is hyper-financialized these days; the economy is fragile & volatile; corporations prioritize shareholder profits over all else... it wasn't always this way. There was a better-regulated time after the Great Depression when the job of banks was to lend money to businesses, employees got pensions instead of stock market shares, salaries weren't stagnant, CEOs and financiers didn't make tens of millions of dollars for running companies into the ground, and businesses could focus on long-term results rather than juicing share prices. But financialization crept back in, regulators gave way to bank executives, and the focus of the finance industry shifted from lending to Main Street business to "wizardry" and speculation on increasingly risky securities. So, not having changed much even after 2008, we're now back to the same risky Wall Street playground we were in before the Great Depression...
I can't read the article about how tech companies are ruining the Internet, because the site shows me a nag-screen informing me that I'm using an ad blocker (a tool that makes the World Wide Web portion of the Internet somewhat more bearable). That's a situation not void of irony :)
Though Netflix is presented as a counter-example, it kind of proves the rule in that they just can't seem to resist tinkering with their app experience, which over years of such, has become akin to one big manipulative dark-patterned ad for itself.
IMO this is not just about the money, it's a problem with almost everything IT. Nothing is ever finished, no products have a well-defined finite scope, everything is ever-changing, in eternal beta.
The SV formula has always been: Get users. Get big. Go home.
Facebook and Twitter and Google and the rest have all got their users with free cool, dynamic development over the years. They've grown and pushed (and bought) everyone else and they've all sold the vast majority of themselves and everyone involved is insanely rich. The current owners are shareholders.
The people on the hook for these things (looking at you, Musk) are desperately trying to figure out where the monetisation's at. Damn everything else. If they can't turn these money pits into a business, what's the point.
I'm still hopeful there'll be a point in time where we're comfortable paying for services, and that these companies find a way to deliver on that value without making us the product. I'd happily pay $10/mo for search that genuinely trie to find the best results. Same for social media.
Funny, I read the author as saying there are not enough ’new’ ideas.
I find the drive to make it new is a curse on mobile. Many apps have betrayed me (1Password) or threw away best features (WeatherUnderground) or just lost touch (Transit) when they update their products with new features.
IMHO, if you want to make something ‘new’, then take a page from Hollywood and call it ‘2’ or ‘revenge’.
Interesting a later thread about new hardware and old software seems to have the same problem—companies won’t support old software with only a small fraction of users.
> I find the drive to make it new is a curse on mobile. Many apps have betrayed me (1Password) or threw away best features (WeatherUnderground) or just lost touch (Transit) when they update their products with new features.
I think this is unfortunately a "natural" progression for companies who focus on growth. In the beginning, they are a small team that has limited resources and is forced to focus on what matters.
Once they grow, they start multiplying the team sizes, introducing new levels of management and hires experienced product and tech people. Often for no other reason that they need to grow, and that means more resources.
The new hires have to justify themselves and need to find work to do. Product people have to make visible changes to signal their worth to upper management, while developers invent new problems to solve so that they rewrite the platform to $current_hype and add complexity and unnecessary scaling.
I just use duck duck go, though they finally copied Google’s “fuck it, you probably didn’t mean to type those “”’s. Here are some irrelevant corners of the internet! YOLO!” feature.
Ironically, Google now honors quotation marks again (returning zero results, like ddg should), but then it produces pages of “how to use a search engine” drivel, below the “no results found” message.
This article really needs more attention. There's so much truth in here, and the tech ecosystem is in a very bad place. Chasing growth, ignoring customers (even paying ones) and users and abusing employees. "Tech" is really just a big financial game. It's no longer about innovation, it's just a big financial game.
(1) FAANG seems to be running out of new ideas. They've collectively turned everything into some kind of feed and frantically reiterated on that trying to squeeze out every penny of it. Some 10 years ago they were searching for "how can we monetize mobile and ads" and now everything seems to look like a nail. Their products all look similar, they're copycatting each others' features and there's barely any "ha, interesting UX idea"-moment anymore.
Also, they're too big to try something new in the small with no or minimal ROI which is especially driven by all of them being public companies with a historically high YoY growth rate. Good news for small disrupting startups. Also for pretty old behemoths who are able to survive hard times like tardigrades (Microsoft) and strategically put themselves into a good waiting position.
(2) The data-driven mindset as a sole strategy seems to be ceasing. To me, this comes without surprise. Having watched product manager work in recent years it looked like mindless and uncreative A/B-testing: "let's push this box 10px to the left and see what happens" and months later "push this box 15px to the right and measure". Data-driven is good, but it does not replace but only augment qualitative product management. Also, "we do design sprints bc Google is doing so" from my perspective often ends in a soulless process where all stakeholders are just doing their thing in order to measure something (anything) systematically cutting out peaks (and lows).
My counter-initiative would be: Can we please make digital products creative, weird, un-commercialized, at least when they're new? Can we again listen more to our guts?