I’ve looked at several data points and statistics for the past like two decades, and the problem is not that technology is not advancing, or that it is somehow getting worse. No, in fact, it’s slowly progressing at a snail’s pace but it’s definitely advancing. The problem though is that leaders in tech are squandering the opportunities available to them, and hindering those that once made technology great.
The biggest threat is definitely outsourcing. You have an entire country of 50 huge ass states. What do you do with that, exactly? You strip the jobs from those states and transfer them to another country overseas, Philippines, Malaysia Thailand, India probably gets the most of them. Any way to cheapen the product that you’re providing in the USA, while simultaneously stealing from those who live in the USA by removing their jobs from them. Long-term, this is not sustainable. Because if you look at layoffs and job shrinkage in the USA and where jobs are actually going, they are not meaningful places. Jobs are being created in lower paying industries, outsourced from higher paying industry is, and the highest paying industries like managerial positions, are not moving at all. It’s embarrassing to say the least.
People think that they are doing a good thing by raising the stock price and jacking it up as high as they can go. Sure, your investments are increasing slowly over time. But the pool of investors becomes smaller because less people can afford to invest, and now you don’t have an educated group of investors, you have a smaller and smaller list of elites that keeps growing, and isn’t wholly owned by everyone in society because the majority of stock owners for big companies are the rich. People who can throw any amount of money they want into a company. So you don’t have good decision making for tech companies.
Bad decision making is what we have come to today, big companies making horrible decisions because they are poorly led by elites who don’t know what they’re doing. Just look at Microsoft if you need any example of this, which of their products is actually well built today? Every one of them functions like crap, their gaming division is collapsing, computers are moving towards copilot which is the worst AI model and platform I have ever seen in my life which is crazy because they I just came out and they are already the worst. But still, they are ruining computing with that, windows 11 is terrible in every single way I can imagine. It is bad decision making every single step of the way.
Then, we have the collapse of industry, the final stage which we are approaching soon. As you can see, big tech in the USA has started to fold in on itself in a way that has never happened before. Microsoft bought out Activision Blizzard and is basically for all intents and purposes, now a monopoly in the tech industry for gaming. Activision Blizzard barely has any competitors, other than maybe EA games which owns so many different smaller gaming companies that it has swallowed up and basically deleted to own the IP for. So tech industry is basically collapsing in on itself, we haven’t seen the worst of it yet but soon, there will be very few tech companies left, only big ones, no choices available and if you want to play games or enjoy any sort of technology you’ll have very few options.
Bonus: alternative market is growing rapidly which is really concerning. The alternative market is what I call Amazon’s scam products. They don’t have any logical name to them, each of them has a different name entirely, they’re mostly just Chinese gibberish, but you can find watches, tablets, any sort of technology on there, there is an off-brand made in Asia or elsewhere cheaply, that has no reviews other than bot generated reviews to make it seem like a real product, and these are not actually tested for anything, I would assume. Not tested for safety, not tested for dangerous materials chemicals or any of that. This is a symptom of widespread poverty, especially among the middle class. People simply can’t afford to buy name brand products anymore. It’s not possible to buy a Samsung or Apple watch every 2 years, so what do they do? Go on Amazon and find ‘Ufolgewits’ brand.
That’s quite a wall of text there. I work in IT, probably the first part of the tech sector to be outsourced, and it has been known as a bad idea for a long time, but it keeps happening. I know of one fortune 50 company that, a little over 1 year ago, outsourced their IT to India. Everything from help desk to knowledge management. They are bringing it back because it was a disaster.
That isn’t to blame India. I’m sure it is full of skilled workers, but you don’t outsource to get the best, you outsource to get cheaper. So what you end up with is the worst workers. And then you tack on a language barrier on top of that and suddenly work in the US grinds to a halt. The problem is, it does save money for a few quarters, the execs who pushed it get their bonuses, and then the real cost hits as systems break down.
Dont forget the time barrier. India is 12hrs apart from PST. You submit an issue and dont hear a response for a whole day. Things that used to take minutes or hours take days or weeks instead, even for simple problems.
It’s the cycle perpetuated by idiots and assholes in C-suite who either do not understand or don’t care because they’ve chosen to prioritize short term profits over making the company sustainable: Outsource to “save money”, lose money because they fired all their competent staff and are left with grossly underpaid, overworked staff on the other side of the planet who often barely give a shit or barely understand, resulting in the company having to rebuild their in house support anyhow, ultimately costing much more money but by then, the execs have probably jumped off with their golden parachute so it’s no longer their problem.
Some leadership is wise enough not to do this, but it’s very, very common.