Category: Technology

Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

That increased profitability can only come from enshittification. Every product manager on Google Search spends their workdays figuring out how to remove a Jenga block.

Source: Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Internally, every powerful person at Google is committed to ensuring that their rival-peers don’t stake out fresh territory as their own. The one thing every top exec can agree on is that the one guy who’s trying to expand the company into an adjacent line of business must not succeed.

What’s worse, these princelings compete with one another. Their individual progression through the upper echelons of Google’s aristocracy depends as much on others failing as it does on their success. The org chart only has so many VP, SVP and EVP boxes on it, and each layer is much smaller than the previous one. If you’re a VP, every one of your colleagues who makes it to SVP takes a spot that you can no longer get.

Those spots are wildly lucrative. Each tier of the hierarchy is worth an order of magnitude more than the tier beneath it. The stakes are so high that they are barely comprehensible.

That means that every one of these Jenga-block-pulling execs is playing blind: they don’t — and can’t — coordinate on the ways they’re planning to lower quality in order to improve profits.

I don’t know if I’ve read a clearer description of the things I’ve seen in 30 years of (mostly) Fortune 250 corporations. Over the course of my career, about a half dozen of my successful software projects — with many happy users — have been sabotaged because they made someone else look bad, or just had the unacceptable side-effect of making me look like I knew what I was doing. Seriously. I could write a book.

Hey, I got paid, and have had a comfy ride along the way. What could I expect as a developer toiling away in the bowels of some faceless blue chip corporation? The only thing the kind of companies I have worked for could offer would be a role with more responsibility but no more pay. Uh… pass.

What really frustrates me in all of this is the tireless effort and work to make sure that software never actually improves workflows or processes for the company, so that eternal middle managers can preserve their tiny little fiefdoms. Sure, we’ll make some software to do something, but by the time the managers “manage,” the people who don’t do the job write the specs, the outsourced programmers who don’t understand anything about the process write the application, the years go by, and the poor schmucks who have to use the thing sign off on the acceptance testing, just to move on, everyone is left with a piece of crap they can’t stand to use, and they wonder why anyone bothered. They’d have been better served just continuing to use horrific, shared Excel spreadsheets.

Google spends a whole-ass Twitter, every single year, just to make sure you never accidentally try another search engine.

I never want to hear another word about what else Elon Musk could have done to supposedly improve the world with the money he spent buying Twitter.

Likewise Google/Apple’s mobile duopoly is more cozy than competitive. Google pays Apple $15–20 billion, every single year, to be the default search in Safari and iOS. If Google and Apple were competing over mobile, you’d expect that one of them would drop the sky-high 30 percent rake they charge on in-app payments, but that would mess up their mutual good thing. Instead, these “competitors” charge exactly the same price for a service with minimal operating costs.

Since the 80’s, American corporations have learned to toe the precise line that will allow them to point fingers at their “competitors” in court to wriggle out of the en vogue legal definition of monopoly, but it’s all such a naked joke. The app stores are the same way. It is a certainty that very-high level execs at Apple and Google have concluded to keep their fees the same, so that the market for app development doesn’t actually work, and is anything but “free.”

Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google

I thought I had malware on my main Windows 11 machine this weekend. There I was minding my own business in Chrome before tabbing back to a game and wham a pop-up appeared asking me to switch my default search engine to Microsoft Bing in Chrome. Stunningly, Microsoft now thinks it’s ok to shove a pop-up in my face above my apps and games just because I dare to use Chrome instead of Microsoft Edge.

Source: Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google

When I was in 8th grade, one of my teachers was out sick, and the principal took over the class for the day. He talked about frames of reference. To illustrate the point, he asked if we had seen the movie, E.T. Of course, we all had. It was the Star Wars-level blockbuster of the summer of 1982. He asked if we remembered the bus scene. None of us could. “You know, ‘Uranus?'” Oh, right. Yes, we all remembered that line. Then he asked us if we could remember what any of the other kids were doing on the bus. Nope. Nothing. They were standing, yelling, throwing things, and generally being disruptive. He said, as a principal, this anarchy on a school bus horrified him. It never even registered with us.

This lesson continues to reverberate with me over 40 years later.

Technical people like me “govern” our computers and devices as much as we can, so when these things happen, they stick out like a sore thumb, and we set about stopping them from happening again. Even after 30 years of “being on the internet,” I am RUTHLESS about spam. When one show up in my inbox, I deal with it, so that, by and large, every email that comes through is of interest and needs my attention.

The people who use Windows because it’s the cheap, default choice are the kind of people that have 10,000 unread emails in their inbox, all of which are spam for services and offers they agreed to be spammed by, because they couldn’t be bothered to at least tick the opt-out box (which only works half the time anyway). When the vast majority of these users see a popup like this, they simply click the button to dismiss it, just like hundreds other digital annoyances they put up with all day long, which they do not understand, and which they do not know how to turn off.

It doesn’t matter that we get upset about this. It’s already been proven several times over that we cannot influence this situation. The incentives just don’t align between users of Windows and Microsoft’s management. You’d expect that they would care about what “power users” like developers would think, so I guess it’s telling how small that community of users is compared to the rest of the people who use Windows.

The real surprise here is that The Verge wrote a piece that is overtly negative about Microsoft.

X marks the motivated reasoning

 

So forgive me if I can’t even get marginally excited for this latest kerfuffle over the new X branding. Primarily because of just how utterly removed the discourse around it is from a good-faith assessment of the merits of the particulars. It’s all turned into an endless proxy war, and every argument is wielded only in service of yet another petty ideological skirmish.

Source: X marks the motivated reasoning

Reddit’s average daily traffic fell during blackout, according to third-party data | Engadget

Compared to the website’s average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13th represented a 6.6 percent drop.

A day later, that metric fell to seven minutes and 17 seconds, or the lowest that stat has been in the past three years.

Source: Reddit’s average daily traffic fell during blackout, according to third-party data | Engadget

Well, so much for a “blackout.” I suppose it depends on how sensitive Reddit’s revenue is on these numbers, but given that they haven’t backed down from any of the behavior that led to this, my guess is “not much.”

Amazon Locks Man Out of His Smart Home After Baseless Racism Accusation

This issue has raised questions about the risks of smart home technology.

Source: Amazon Locks Man Out of His Smart Home After Baseless Racism Accusation

However, despite clearing the air with Amazon, Jackson’s account was still locked for an entire week.

I mean… what?! The craziest part of Orwell’s dire warnings about total surveillance and control by the State is that the whole thing was subcontracted to corporations for tax benefits to avoid the Constitutional ramifications. Not only that, but “we” are lining up in droves to pay for the equipment to enable this in order to, say, save 10% on things bought through the poster child of an “enshittified” corporation.

Following the messy ordeal, Jackson said he is “seriously considering discontinuing” his Amazon Echo devices.

On what planet would someone who went through this not immediately rip out any and all Amazon-connected devices from their home? Why would anyone continue to install it with just this one story as an example of what can happen when you give a faceless corporation control over your home? Not only have the “lizard people” been revealed by this situation, this guy — and we, collectively — are saying, “Well, maybe they’re not so bad.” I literally can’t even.

It Happens

Missing an Opportunity

I have great respect for Jason, but it feels like there’s an important point being elided here. Since her uncle owns it, Musk is accusing the Internet Archive of removing evidence of Taylor Lorenz’s online footprint, for the purpose of shielding her from her own embarrassing and/or incriminating writing. At first blush, this seems to be an attack on the mission of the Archive.

However, something like 15 years ago, I needed a fresh start with my online presence, and contacted Jason directly, and had him remove my site (this site) from the Archive. I had to send a copy of my driver’s license, which I thought was eminently reasonable.

What I didn’t know is that this would exclude this site from the archive forever. I suppose I could ask it to be re-added, but I think it’s fine. I don’t need to waste any more bits on any more hard drives.

Anyway, my point is that this sort of thing happens. Whether it happened because Lorenz asked, or her uncle directed it, and for whatever reason, people have a right to not be tracked. Further, the Archive may be the only site in the world that I trust to actually delete data when asked. Seems like a good time to expound the integrity of the institution. Instead, he indulged in some Musk Derangement Syndrome, as evidenced by the “emerald mine” reference, which isn’t actually a thing.

Basecamp implodes as employees flee company, including senior staff

After a controversial blog post in which CEO Jason Fried outlined Basecamp’s new philosophy that prohibited, among other things, “societal and political discussions” on internal forums, company co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson said the company would offer generous severance packages to anyone who disagreed with the new stance. On Friday, it appears a large number of Basecamp employees are taking Hansson up on his offer: according to The Verge contributing editor Casey Newton’s sources, roughly a third of the company’s 57 employees accepted buyouts today. As of Friday afternoon, 18 people had tweeted they were planning to leave.

Source: Basecamp implodes as employees flee company, including senior staff

This came back up in an HN discussion about their new web app deployment tool, MRSK. (And, being a big fan of Capistrano, I really want to try.) I remember this happening, and I remember the outsized reaction to it. Here’s a tiny company of only 57 employees, and yet this story reverberated around the IT news world. The audacity!

On top of that outsized reaction, what hadn’t really registered was that 18 people jumped ship. A third! An entire third of the company was so upset that they couldn’t espouse their politics on internal forums that they had to leave. It’s been about 2 years now, and they’ve launched an entirely new product, so I guess the predictions of their demise were… probably just wishful thinking.

Reminds me of another controversial company changing gears, and being predicted to fail miserably…

AI and the Big Five – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Mobile ended up being dominated by two incumbents: Apple and Google. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t disruptive, though: Apple’s new UI paradigm entailed not viewing the phone as a small PC, a la Microsoft; Google’s new business model paradigm entailed not viewing phones as a direct profit center for operating system sales, but rather as a moat for their advertising business.

Source: AI and the Big Five – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

I think it’s worth noting something here. Just before this paragraph is this:

The PC was disruptive to nearly all of the existing incumbents; these relatively inexpensive and low-powered devices didn’t have nearly the capability or the profit margin of mini-computers, much less mainframes. That’s why IBM was happy to outsource both the original PC’s chip and OS to Intel and Microsoft, respectively, so that they could get a product out the door and satisfy their corporate customers; PCs got faster, though, and it was Intel and Microsoft that dominated as the market dwarfed everything that came before.

It seems to me that Microsoft was guilty of the same sin as IBM when it came to mobile. IBM viewed PC’s as tiny little mainframes. Microsoft viewed “smart” phones as tiny little PC’s.

Whenever people write like this, it nags at me, that a massive, multinational corporation’s motivations could be represented by a single viewpoint, held by a single person. But then I force myself to relax, realize that the organization’s actions really do boil down to being explained like this, and commit to the simplification for narrative purposes. So, acknowledging this… What “IBM” couldn’t “see” was that, while “limited” in relation to a mainframe, the PC was capable enough to do things that mainframes couldn’t do. I’ll never forget the Aha! moment I had in my first engineering job. “I was there, Gandalf;  3000 years ago.”

I was working for a small (80-ish people) company that made air compressors. They had just gotten bought by a huge, multinational air tool conglomerate, and the former owner had spun off a tiny portion of the tiny business to a new, separate company. As part of the new owner’s investment, the company was buying new PC’s for “the office.” Five of us got new, genuine IBM, i486DX2 66 PC’s with all the goodies, including real IBM Model M buckling-spring mechanical keyboards. They were glorious.

In an old garage, next to the main building, was a pile of “stuff” leftover from the rearrangement. In that pile, I found an internal, 4800 bps modem, and a full-length “mainframe” card, for attaching to a token ring network, and emulating a terminal. I installed both into my PC, and got my boss to let me get a Prodigy account. (And discovered Doom.) The “mainframe” card allowed me to connect to the mainframe, but I don’t (and still don’t) know anything about mainframes, so I just left it there.

Then my boss asked me to do a BOM comparison between 2 similar compressor models, and pointed me at two giant, mainframe printouts on green-barred, spoked paper, in those terrible binders with the variable-length metal straps to hold them together. They were about 2 inches thick. I started to compare the paper reports for about a minute before I had a thought…

I got the lady who ran the mainframe (an IBM System/36) to make me BOM reports for both compressor models. This apparently took an entire program to be written, and it was no wonder that mainframes were already dying by 1993, but I digress. I was able to download the reports to my PC over the “mainframe” card. Of course, these reports, being simple lines of text, were only a megabyte or so, but I had eight megabytes in my fancy new PC! So I was able to import both BOM’s into Quattro Pro, and do some spreadsheet manipulation to show the differences.

This sort of simple, quick, ad-hoc query and reporting capability, enabled by spreadsheets, has been the backbone upon which all corporate business has been run for almost 30 years. A lot of company data now lives in cloud services, which have their own query and reporting tools, but my perception is that Excel is still a core tool that the majority of people in the Fortune 1000 are using to manage their workflows. Like, you could take away literally everything else but Excel and email, and you’d be fine. It would take some adjustment, of course, but the business would carry on. That’s how critical it is.

IT managers in large corporations like to think that their multi-million dollar IT systems are special, and there’s an attitude that the company couldn’t exist without them now that they’ve been implemented. Entire kingdoms are built around them in the modern, corporate, fuedal-like system present in every Fortune 1000. However, the people running these systems don’t seem to understand that there is invariably enormous activity in the company devoted to shoring up these systems with ad-hoc tools in Excel, simply because the team responsible for the system will never have the time to implement the customizations the users need to make the system truly useful for their work. At least, if they do know it, they ignore it, and they can, because they are not held accountable for the vast quantities of technical debt and wasted work because of their compromised implementation, which stopped short of all the promises upon which the system was sold to the monarchy. The true costs were never actually presented, and now that “shortage” not only gets spent, but gets duplicated all over the company, because spreadsheets do not “scale.”

I didn’t start out to make that point, but this is why I write: to “work out my thinking,” as I state in the sub-title of this blog.

Why do I know? Because if I could sum up my 27-year career, the central theme of it would be creating applications to replace terrible, shared Excel spreadsheets with — hopefully, less terrible — web and native applications, tailor-made for the workflow the spreadsheets were supporting. I can count 13, right off the top of my head, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some of the smaller ones. I’ve spent about 21 of my years in Fortune 250’s, so maybe I have a jaded view, but my feeling is that this extrapolates through all big companies, world-wide.

This is what IBM missed. People know what they need, and will use “manual” effort to get around corporate IT lethargy. At first, it was  routing around mainframes, and their impossibly slow development times. Now it’s every large, “corporate” system, like CRM or ERP or PDM, and their impossibly slow development times. The limitation of “the mainframe” wasn’t in its hardware or its development language, it was in the system of fiefdom that is the corporate budget allocation system, and the unintended consequences it produces, specifically the unaccountability inherent in the fact that the monarchs can’t understand the technical and logistical limitations in customizing a large system, and the true costs are therefore elided in the endless budget cycle. And when an aging system is deemed fit to retire and replace, the whole cycle starts all over, with corporate IT creating a system just shy of what’s really needed, and end-users creating spreadsheets to backfill the gap.

A lot of these kinds of systems — particularly HR — have been moving to the cloud. Why? In my estimation, it’s not because they’re cheaper, even on paper. It’s because those systems are fully-formed, and include all the end-user-facing querying and reporting needed to make the system useful for every requirement. Fortune 500 companies could have made a streamlined version of, say, Workday, for their specific, internal use, but corporate IT — as a standalone, ivory tower, ultimately beholden only the the CEO, who couldn’t care less — could never figure out how to work closely enough with the user community to address all of their needs. So now, users have to put up with yet-another-end-all-be-all system, designed to address the needs of every company on earth. But! At least, once they figure out the workflow to get what they need, it’s all downhill from there. Here’s the key: at least it’s possible without Excel.

More and more workflow operations will continue to expand into cloud-based services, but it’s only possible to do this with services every company needs. This is why we’re seeing a deluge of advertising for HR apps, even on TV, each designed to hit a different company size and price point. It’s not possible to do this with, say, PDM applications, so companies like mine are going to continue to be hamstrung with a systems like Integrity/Windchill. On the one hand, it’s become an important tool which must be used to get products out the door. On the other hand, it doesn’t do a whole bunch of stuff people really need it to do with the data it already has — and it never will — so there are a whole bunch of Excel spreadsheets running loose in the company that duplicate the data, waste the manual effort, and do the things that need to be done, which IT has no knowledge of, and does not care about, because it doesn’t show up as a liability against their budget. And the situation will continue, for the foreseeable future.

Why Not Mars (Idle Words)

Somehow we’ve embarked on the biggest project in history even though it has no articulable purpose, offers no benefits, and will cost taxpayers more than a good-sized war. Even the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza could at least explain what it was for. And yet this project has sailed through an otherwise gridlocked system with the effortlessness of a Pentagon budget. Presidents of both parties now make landing on Mars an official goal of US space policy. Even billionaires who made their fortune automating labor on Earth agree that Mars must be artisanally explored by hand.

The whole thing is getting weird.

Source: Why Not Mars (Idle Words)

It is my contention that the first space program was cover for developing rockets and guidance systems to neatly deposit nuclear warheads on Russian leaders with pinpoint accuracy. Might a manned mission to Mars offer a similar Trojan Horse vehicle to develop actual “Star Wars” weaponry, in space, and on the moon? It would explain the ease of getting that funding through Congress. The deep state always gets what the deep state wants.

Regardless, this is an incredibly well-written article, and worth linking for its own sake. I mean:

Like George Lucas preparing to release another awful prequel, NASA is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense.

Fake CISO Profiles on LinkedIn Target Fortune 500s

“I shot a note to LinkedIn and said please remove this, and they said, well, we have to contact that person and arbitrate this,” he said. “They gave the guy two weeks and he didn’t respond, so they took it down. But that doesn’t scale, and there needs to be a mechanism where an employer can contact LinkedIn and have these fake profiles taken down in less than two weeks.”

Source: Fake CISO Profiles on LinkedIn Target Fortune 500s

Allowing companies to take down profiles they don’t like sounds exactly like something Microsoft would be all about.