Software gets more expensive over time when you write it like spaghetti coded crap in a “move fast and break things” environment where you build so much technical debt that you can’t touch anything without breaking 5 other things, and suddenly even simple changes take hundreds of developer hours, which you don’t have because half your team is fighting bugs.
Luckily all of our most critical services run on well-developed platforms that get the time and resources they need to be durable and maintainable over time. (biggest /s I’ve ever written)
Fucking Factorio engineers everywhere, I swear.
I don’t think a better analogy could possibly be made for this. Congrats, you win
This is unfortunately true… Tho what is driving the rent seeking isnt tech debt its greed
The word he’s describing is called “enshittification”.
No, it’s monopoly capitalism. A certain Mr. Marx from Germany had a few things to say about it.
One consequence of monopoly capitalism is businesses pursuing growth in revenue more aggressively than growth in user base.
When the market is saturated, all you can do to pursue growth is to increase unit margin. This eventually leads to production of “fictitious capital” as a stand in for real capital (as paper assets cost virtually nothing to produce).
Das Kapital goes into lengthy detail about this process. Specifically, the “how much does it cost to make a coat” chapter gets into it in (exhaustive) detail.
Enshittification is a feature of capitalism, smartass.
Sure. But it’s a consequence of monopolisation. Once you break up the monopolies, enshittification will no longer be economically viable.
Monopolization becomes inevitable in a capitalist economy since the wealthy are still the ones with power, and they will always seek to increase their wealth by any means necessary.
Even in a heavilly regulated form of capitalism, the wealthy will do everything in their power to slowly strip regulations over a period of time where they think people won’t notice and attempt to move public opinion towards the wealthy class’s benefit via propaganda.
“You’re not talking about Sprite, but about sugary soft drinks” <- that’s you
I have no idea what you’re trying to say here.
I was giving a name to a specific feature of capitalism and you were all “umm actually”-ing me that I’m talking about capitalism.
That’s like:
Me: “I really like this chocolate croissant” You: “Actually, you’re talking about a pastry 🤓”
My point is that you were mixing up cause and effect.
id argue enshittification is a consequence of monopoly capitalism, and not a separate thing.
Enshittification has nothing to do with pricing.
It’s about market capture and the resulting lack of choices allowing market holders to maximize profits by degrading product performance. This can occur even when the product has no price.
That’s part of enshittification. Step 2 of enshittification is to entice in business buyers with low prices and changes that meet their needs. Step 3 is to cut costs and start price gouging to maximize profits.
Google is free to use. It still is. There is no price.
Facrbook, fee to use. Still is.
Both have been enshittified. There is no price being gouged.
The services they do sell are to advertisers, those costs are not being cut, they are focused on improving their targeting to attract more revenue.
Enshittification is a very simply concept; only product quality is measured. There might be price gouging but turn doesn’t have to be.
You’re missing half the point of enshittification. I’m just going to quote Doctorow directly:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”
I think the price being gouged by Google and Facebook enshittification is your time being wasted for their own benefit. Your time and attention is what they sell after all.
Counterexamples: Netflix without ads, Gamepass, Tinder.
I’d say that pricing is part of the deal which can get worse. Claiming that it’s not enshittification is useless nitpicking, IMHO.
Going to stroke this image for the next time I see some dumb cunt using the term enshitification unironically.
eBooks and digital rentals should cost a fraction of their physical counterparts, but instead they cost more because of
greedconvenience.The expensive part of making books is not the paper. My wife is an independent author and between editing, typesetting, cover design, etc. she spent about $1500 to publish each of her books.
While she could price her books at $1, that would present her with a few problems.
Firstly, people often value things based on what they’ve paid for them, so pricing your book too low makes people assume it is of poor quality.
Secondly, having positive reviews is extremely important for indie authors because the Almighty Algorithm will reward you or punish you based on the book’s rating. Other indie authors she has talked to have seen a noticable decline in their book’s rating after Amazon put it on sale and a bunch of people who might not have otherwise read it started buying copies. If you’ve ever worked retail or food service, you probably know that bargain hunters are often the people who are least reasonable and hardest to please. If the book is too cheap, you may attract an audience that harms its reputation.
Finally, trying to sell 2000+ copies of a book is pretty daunting for small authors and that’s about what it would take to break even at $1 per copy.
Could big publishers and well known authors sell books for a buck? Probably. But for the majority of authors who aren’t making their living by writing and only sell a few hundred copies ever, that’s not really realistic.
Those are reasonable statements, but it doesn’t explain why the digital equivalents cost MORE than their physical counterparts. Especially considering there’s no manufacturing, distribution, shipping, storage, etc… Sure, servers and bandwidth cost money, but nowhere near what an entire physical distribution chain costs. It’s pennies on the dollar.
Especially since the marginal cost of information goods is zero
That assumes the work of creating or collating the information has been fully amortized. The cost of information should tend toward zero, but it should start high enough to fairly reward its creators and those who made it visible
I can’t think of a recent time where I’ve seen an eBook that cost more than the paperback but I haven’t been looking specifically. In my experience, the eBook is usually a buck or two cheaper than the print version.
I’m open to being wrong about this.
All the books I’ve seen in Amazon are like this
I don’t buy at Amazon, usually when I do is Google or Kobo, and the prices are similar to Amazons sometimes slightly cheaper.
No, they cost more because of Steve Jobs.
This is your reminder that that man was utter trash.
I don’t need reminders but I love thorough paper trails.
I also read manuals if you’re wondering. No sarcasm.
Manuals are cool though.
Epub and PDF files are free though. Just gotta look harder.
Everything digital is free if you look hard enough, and are comfortable with piracy, but I’m talking about retail transactions.
Everything retail is free if you want it hard enough and are comfortable with theft.
Or permanently borrowing like that old lady in Titanic
Ebooks are less convenient because once you buy and read it you’re stuck with it and can’t resell.
Books can be had second hand for dirt cheap, too. For ebook you’re paying full price.
True, but I can’t get a paperback at midnight, while laying in bed, and have it in my hands 10 seconds later.
I have lots of books in paper. I have dozens electronically
The paper ones are good. I can lend them to friends, smell them, have them looking good on a shelf, can read while I’m doing something else on my phone
The electronic ones are with me. I can read them when I find myself surprisingly with nothing better to do.
Printing a book on paper and distributing physical books isn’t the majority of the cost of a book. Should ebooks be cheaper? Yes should they cost a fraction of a paper book? No since most of the cost in publishing does not depend on the medium of distribution. Most of the cost is basically the salaries of the people they have to pay to get the book onto the market (the writer, editor, marketing, etc) it doesn’t matter if it’s digital or physical these costs stay the same. Publishers basically lose money with the majority of the books they publish and make most of their money with the few hits they release each year.
Great argument for piracy, thanks
I was renting a water heater. It had been installed in my house in the early 1980s. And the rental contract had been handed down from home owner to home owner.
But there was never an attempt at maintenance, even upon request I got told “there’s no need, there’s nothing to maintain on it.” but they kept increasing the rental cost year over year “because of inflation”. It had been paid off for decades! What do you mean you need to charge more? What exactly am I paying for? My water heater is just a number in your books. You have zero costs for it!
… Why would you rent a way heater, in a home you own? Is the house a school or something???
I’ve since replaced it with a water heater I bought outright. For a while I wasn’t aware that you could just buy a heater. So I just gritted my teeth and paid up.
But my point was the weird and pointless increase of fees.
I’ve read your response to others that you bought the replacement outright, but I wonder if the original renter was about to sell their house and needed a water heater. Saddling the future with this debt could be cheaper than buying it outright.
I don’t know. It might be that it was usual at that time to rent those things than to buy them. My parents also had a rented water heater when they owned a home, which is why I didn’t even think twice about it.
I don’t know how expensive those boilers were in the 80s.
Probably this… if you’re not going to benefit from the new water heater, you’d probably be tempted to pass it off to the next owner. Renting is a way to do that.
Get a heat pump water heater and give them back that junk!
I have since replaced it with a water heater I bought outright. Sadly a heat pump isn’t an option in my home. So it’s a simple electric 80liter water heater.
There was another thread recently about what happened in your life that made you no longer feel like a child. I think for me one of those things was realizing that the price of things has very little to do at all with the cost of creating that thing.
Price = Cost of Materials + (Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man) + Cost of Labor.
It’s Econ 101
Nah, the cost of labor + materials + distribution is the minimum price of an item. The actual price in practice will be that price + whatever the manufacturer can get away with charging.
What determines the premium they can get away with is whether or not alternative goods exist and whether or not the consumers are informed of them, motivated to seek them out, and capable of making the switch.
whatever the manufacturer can get away with charging.
In this case, the manufacturer is a middle man
Price is whichever is greater: what they think the highest cost*adoption will be or the minimum people will do it for.
Macroecnomics is just all the different ways we ruin microeconomics
Marco is microecon when you hit the boundaries of the closed system.
The problem with modern Western application of Macro is that it just tries to scale up Micro to the size of countries and continents. No consideration for limited lifetime resources, negative externalities, or long term growth rates under deteriorating conditions.
True proper macro economics asks questions about peak oil and pension funding and the real cost of global military conflicts, rather than obsessing itself with next quarter growth figures at the GDP scale.
Non-economist: the economy must be shit because I can barely afford bread.
Economist: UR WRONG, GDP GO UPThat’s more or less the state of discourse right now and it’s embarrassing.
Economist: UR WRONG, GDP GO UP
There’s a guy I love, named Richard D. Wolff, who loves to joke about how colleges insist on having an Economics School and a Business School, when these should theoretically be the same field of study. Then he’ll bring up a few anecdotes over professors from the respective schools arguing over this or that point of orthodoxy.
My favorite is “The Economic Calculation Problem”, a thing that Chicago School Economists swear by, but which executives at vertically integrated firms like Exxon, Walmart, and Amazon defy on a daily basis. There’s a great book called “The People’s Republic of Walmart” that suggests a lot of the underlying computational problems of economics have been resolved within these mega-corps, using the same theories and policies once practiced by Soviet-Era states.
That’s the real divide between Macro In-Theory and In-Practice. One is functionally just state propaganda, while the other is the hard math of balancing a global supply of finite resources and labor while generating consistently larger surpluses.
There’s a great book called “The People’s Republic of Walmart” that suggests a lot of the underlying computational problems of economics have been resolved within these mega-corps, using the same theories and policies once practiced by Soviet-Era states.
Sounds interesting. Chicago school being wrong yet again would hardly be surprising but it still sounds like an interesting read.
And that cost of labor
I buy a fair bit of meat. At my nearest butcher scotch fillet steak (rib eye, I think, in American English) is $35 per kilo. It is from a meat packing plant with reasonably cheap labor, with expensive equipment amortized over thousands of cattle a year, cutting up cows all day
At my next nearest butcher it’s $60/kg. It’s cut off a cow carcass hanging in the back of the shop by a butcher with a knife
On the good side there are few middle men in meat
Come down to Texas and you can get a ribeye for closer to $12/kg.
Mine are grass finished, and watered with rain - the most environmentally friendly meat available. I expect the cheap meat in Texas is grain finished, which makes each animal fatter and heavier and cheaper per unit weight
This is actually the reason why taxes don’t increase luxury item costs as the cost is set to the market demand rather than from supply. In fact, the benefits from taxes help people afford more products in a virtuous cycle. It’s also the reason tariffs or taxes on raw goods are so bad as you actually are creating dead weight loss and driving down demand which can be useful or detrimental depending on why someone needs that product.
“But but but, my yacht collection? 😟”
~ Gabe Newell
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php
Yeah that is fucking gross.
Shhhht, you’ll make people angry!
Why would people get angry about a relatively benevolent rich guy who’s single handedly done more for the Linux ecosystem and gaming than pretty much anyone else?
Is it cause he’s rich?
No, they’ll get angry at the guy pointing out that one guy they like is actually taking their money to build a yacht collection while they can’t imagine ever owning a house.
There are no benevolent rich guy and Linux isn’t life, the reason billionaires exist is because we pay more for stuff than they’re worth in order to enrich one man at the top of the chain.
Correction: Linux is life
The exploitation is baked in the cake
I think you meant to type “yes.”
That’s fine, I just like to get everyone on record.
GabeN is evil, we’re all on the same page right?
My criticism of capitalism disappearing the moment I see steam sale.
I mean, if I have to choose who gets my surplus income, I’m more partial to Newell than Bezos, Gates, or Walton.
But it still sucks that these billions don’t go straight back to the developers.
Modern opiate dealer
Cloud costs are going down
¿Huh?
Companies often have less new stuff to add
They never run out of stuff to add. Give any company enough resources and you would see weird and completely unrelated stuff attached to their products. I kid you not, I can apparently get a vet appointment in a taxi app, and my bank is now selling clothes and… car parts? While the bank part of the app literally has no option to filter out only incoming transactions. Priorities, I guess…
Yeah companies need to stop being allowed to be multiple industries.
Like why does every department store have a credit card now? They should be using their profits to pay their employees, not loaning it out at insane interest rates.
Usually those cards are serviced by a bank, the department store doesn’t loan its money. I know a lot of stores use Synchrony bank
this is what they do when they run out of stuff to add, yes
This is what I don’t get. Progress and tech are supposed to make things cheaper and more efficient, not more expensive and resource hungry.
The rebound effect summarised
We are more efficient. In my work computer automation has saved the equivalent to five thousand workers
Those five thousand workers don’t get to work a fraction of a day for the same pay, the saving is made a level or five above the workers
Some of our savings are hidden by inflation, but many products are far cheaper now
Absolutely they do, which is why the competition could not compete. Once the whole market is dominated by a few companies, it lets them get a little more creative with how they price things, and a little lazier with their coding practices.
You could also try to write modular software and use standardized interfaces to prevent vendor lock in. Haha who am i kidding…
The problem (outside of competence and the fact that most people only really understand one tool) is that they’re deliberately architected in ways that make it difficult to operate on them the same way. They’re not just different function calls; they want you to make completely different assumptions about how to do things.
Yeah but my boss told me I should use the magic API because it’s a panacea and will solve all of our problems.
Strong anti-trust enforcement is the key. As long as the major cloud providers are actually competing, it shouldn’t be an issue.
Price-fixers need to face real consequences, not like the slap on the wrist that they got for fixing the price of ebooks at 10$.
She’s over reached a couple times and shot themselves in the foot, but Lina Khan is a boss.
Demand goes down over time but the board expects increasing results. It’s the capitalism.
In an e-mail to [Steve] Jobs, Cue attributed Random House’s capitulation in part to ‘the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store this week.’"
Well we all knew those things happened but it’s the first time I see proof.
Use Linux?
FOSS
Greedflation is the word you’re looking for.
This is kinda flawed. Most businesses need to recoup their investment, and some upfront costs going away is part of the plan to profitability.
I think this guy is confusing all “software businesses” and fortune 100 tech companies.
Edit: there are ton of businesses that make software, don’t become unicorns or make billions, that survive on a product suiting some niche. To say “software companies” take crazy margins is stupid. Big tech is the issue, not software (see linux)
Most businesses need to recoup their investment
The markets jumped 30% this year alone, even in the face of a higher than recently normal interest rate.
The problem isn’t recoupment of losses, it’s an expectation of skyrocketing future growth.
The end result is a lending market chasing unicorns, quarter after quarter, as businesses promising increasingly ludicrous returns to lure those investors in.
Youre describing the fortune 100 tech companies, as I said.
Plenty of smaller startups survived, still develop, support and improve their software very far from everything you’re describing here. Should maintainers be paid less and less as the project ages?
Software shouldn’t get cheaper as it ages. Big tech companies should stop milking monopolies off tax payer funds. It has nothing to do with the cost / lifecycle of software
Plenty of smaller startups survived, still develop, support and improve their software very far from everything you’re describing here.
The successful startups are gobbled up by the Big Tech firms. Instagram got eaten by Facebook. Nest and Fitbit were eaten by Google. Microsoft is a nesting doll of smaller game companies.
Software shouldn’t get cheaper as it ages.
Linux suggests otherwise. Once you have a functional feature suite, you’re just performance tuning to new hardware.
Excel hasn’t materially changed in decades. Why does the price go up with every new edition, while it’s peer software in LibreOffice continue to be free?
There are many more successful startups than the ones who make the news and become unicorns. Again your talking about big tech and fortune 100 tech companies, not software.
Linux doesn’t suggest otherwise, maintainers exist who need to be paid and it’s not just “performance”, thats silly.
You say excel hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades but that’s not true. There is still a ton of tech debt in excel that affects real people, some who have left for a competitor. All these people here https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel/feature-request/m-p/7702 seem to disagree excel was done a long time ago. Clearly you dont work in software and are relying on what software looks like though tabloids.
There are many more successful startups than the ones who make the new and become unicorns.
There are plenty of startups that don’t fail. If that’s the benchmark of success, you’re still only talking about something on the order of 10-20% of businesses. But companies that become regionally competitive, rather than simply filling a specialist IT local niche, are target rich for M&A.
You say excel hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades but that’s not true. There is still a ton of tech debt in excel
The existence of technical debt does not refute the claim that its hardly changed. Its evidence that much of the core architecture hasn’t changed and flashing features have just been stacked on top in an increasingly precarious manner.
Clearly you dont work in software
Tu quoque
Hasn’t changed?
10-20% of businesses?
Dude nobody has time to refute these nonsense claims. It’s not “tu quoque” if that’s not the statement discrediting your claim and if youre clearly talking like someone who isn’t in the industry. Software is more than what twitter says exists, and goes beyond FAANG or the fortune 500.
Dude nobody has time to refute these nonsense claims.
This is Business School 101, stuff.
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“when done drops to zero”.
This isn’t true at all. Software ages, you need to make it better to keep up with new shit. This isn’t a software issue, it’s a big tech/monopoly issue. Youre talking about big tech companies.
Other software exists, it’s not just Instagram and tiktok.
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Thats because you define software by whatever successful startup comes a unicorn. There are millions of software companies that never make a billion dollars. Theyre still a software company making a product that doesn’t become free.
Youre also mixing total cost versus margin. Nobody is saying software is more expensive than hardware
