6 ms·

>The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns [...] VCs are not the r

by jasode 6y ago

>The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns [...] VCs are not the root cause. You're not looking hard enough for counterexamples. Examples of software companies that didn't take VC money that many consider to be "user hostile" are: - Intuit -- see 1-star reviews on Amazon of annual Quicken releases and forced upgrades of buggy software that nobody wants - Autodesk -- expensive licensing and stagnant features and bug fixes in Revit, 3ds Max, etc - Microsoft -- list of various user complaints over decades are well known [pedantic alert: MS took a little bit of VC money from David F. Marquardt but they didn't need it because they were already profitable with cash in the bank; they just wanted DFM as an advisor for their upcoming IPO] The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. E.g. Look at COVID causing some colleges/universities cancelling in-person classes and refuse to refund tuition fees claiming that "video instruction" is same quality of education. The money came from students and not VCs. You can't blame VCs for that. >VC is ripe for disruption. The issue is the company founders, not the VCs.

EarthIsHome 6y ago
> The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. Let's take this further and ask What is the driving factor for humans to want to accumulate more money? I think the human founders are responding to external pressures that incentivize the accumulation of wealth.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  R.e. "external" pressures. This explanation does not seem very efficient. There are tangible benefits to wealth accumulation. Wealth can afford its owner many kinds of different pleasures that are less available to the less wealthy. It also protects from many harms. All organisms in existence are avaricious to some extent or another, because the ancestral environment favors this trait.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    There are also tangible disbenefits - like having your home destroyed by climate change, or having your democracy hollowed out, having to live with the risk of bankruptcy if you get ill. Never mind the loss of online privacy. The problem is that raising these as the real issues they are puts you outside the dominant ideology. If you don't do it anonymously you are in real danger of discrimination during job searches. And if you do it forcefully and polemically enough - to the point where you start getting an activist audience instead an audience of passive click-consumers you can monetise - you'll attract more direct forms of attention. Humans are avaricious, but humans are not only avaricious. Our ability to cooperate and to look after each other is one of the key evolutionary developments that led to to our success as a species. From this point view neoliberalism, nationalism, and other competitive/extractive ideologies are an unwelcome return to dumb competitive animality. Some individuals win big, but the species as a whole damages its long-term survival prospects - literally and eventually very tangibly.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      > There are also tangible disbenefits - like having your home destroyed by climate change, or having your democracy hollowed out, having to live with the risk of bankruptcy if you get ill. These all seem like things wealth protects from, which helps explain why founders and all other humans will tend to want to accumulate it.
      - bergstromm466 6y ago
        > These all seem like things wealth protects from This sounds to me like Silicon Valley solutionism. Getting rich only works for some time in a world with widespread crop failures and the many other effects of global heating. [1] When that happens I'd say it's only a matter of time before the pitchforks and guillotines come out... “I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.” ― Eduardo Galeano [1] https://archive.is/mXJ1B https://archive.is/mXJ1B
ohazi 6y ago
> The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. At least for software, we know of one solution that works: free (as in speech) software. Still made by humans, but usually without the self-serving greed, and if any of that does turn up, you never lose access to the last-good version and source, in case you or someone else wants to fork it. That's not to say that there aren't valid complaints about the availability and usability of free software. There are some free applications that can do amazing things, but are genuinely less intuitive than comparable commercial software. It's not surprising that users who aren't free software diehards don't want to use these tools. There are also entire ecosystems where free software just isn't a thing, e.g. phone software and hosted user services.
- mawise 6y ago
  This type of thinking has been a huge motivator to my side project as I try to envision what a more user-centric internet could look like. The core being self-hosted internet infrastructure--my project being an open-source, easy-to-run, _private_ blog. https://simpleblogs.org https://simpleblogs.org
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  That's not sustainable. Most OSS nowadays is produced by big companies looking at OSS as a way to retain or capture more engineering talent. It somehow works for small individuals because having a nice github can be useful to get a job or bypass the ridiculous interviewing process of the day. A few heroes barely live off donations from wealthy companies and patreons, others sell development courses on the side. The real problem is that companies in our society grow too much and we end up with a few outliers companies and hordes of employees. Unfortunately, as soon as a company gets money or becomes successful enough to lobby the government for more regulations, they can effectively make it harder for competitor to pop up. The fact that starting a business is a logistic hassle because of corporate taxes is another barrier. I'd like to see more micro companies and individuals providing value to society instead of giant corporations. OSS can be a part of that, but it doesn't have to be.
  - 6y ago
ponker 6y ago
I don’t agree on your “user hostile” examples outside of Intuit but agree with your take —- founders know what VC is. The reason they started the company in the first place is to get rich.
Ericson2314 6y ago
What sort of "root cause" analysis goes for the human nature of a founders? Yikes, are we that overly-focused on the individual? Let my say the obvious, all those non-VC companies are publicly held. So let me get to the heart of the matter, if you have investors, they will demand returns on their investment. And if you don't have investors, you will have to compete externally (e.g. users) and internally (e.g. salaries) with those that do.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I.e. if you want to survive, the market will keep you in lockstep with the worst of your competitors on the market. So ultimately it still boils down to "problems of unconstrained markets".
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
VCs are here both symbolic of a system that seeks outsized returns and the catalysts of that system. VC funding is the accepted model for startup success and it's very difficult to find advice on starting a serious startup that doesn't anticipate VC-style backing. As a result, it's become the norm and an obvious starting point. Capturing the culture of early-stage startups in this way has lead to a monoculture where even communities like Indie Hackers advocates for VC funding[0]. VCs aren't literally the problem but they represent and reinforce the broken status-quo. I'm interested in the properties of the system we've created and participate in and so this is a generalized observation. There are always counterexamples to generalisations but that's not to say that there isn't something valuable about the generalisation itself. I'm not arguing that without VCs founders would be perfect altruists but there could be other funding models that create fewer conflicts of interest between producers and consumers of technology. [0] - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-doesn-t-mean-bootstrapped-anymore-a88300c012 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-doesn-t-mean-bootstr...
yerabotarry 6y ago
> The issue is the company founders, not the VCs. The issue is the veneer behind these IoT, Social media, Internet time wasters, and occasional productivity boosters are wearing off. There is no competition (less VC money) to serve the community better and the real reason for these companies existing remains bare. All they want to do is monitor you, manipulate you, get your money, and kill your productivity. The user always will lose outside of the occasional paragdim shift or productivity boost. As it stands now there is no vision to change existing platforms thus in this age the user will always lose. There is no reason to contribute anything to the online sphere (outside of technical areas) as it is like pissing in the wind.
bleepblorp 6y ago
The real problem here is excessive governmental tolerance of monopolies and the lack of an adequate regulatory/legal regime to protect end-users from harms caused by vendor-lock in. All of the companies you mention have near-monopolies in their respective sectors. Hundreds of years of economic history show that monopolies are extremely harmful to their customers. Autodesk is only able to get away with what it does because regulators allowed it to buy out its competitors. Further, the extreme technical difficulty of reverse-engineering complex file formats--including legal obstacles such as enforceable shrink-wrap contracts against reverse engineering, the DMCA ban on reverse engineering, and patent issues--means that it's virtually impossible for competing, interoperable, products to emerge in Autodesk's markets. Microsoft continues to be a problem because the US government decided, 25 years ago, that stopping Microsoft from abusing its operating system monopoly was unAmerican. Companies, like people, follow incentives. The incentives created by strong copyright and patent law, combined with the deliberate unenforcement of anti-trust laws in the United States, prevent competition. Without competition, customers always lose. Getting users a fair deal means changing the rules that define the software market to consider the needs of users rather than only the wants of vendors.
- Animats 6y ago
  Autodesk is only able to get away with what it does because regulators allowed it to buy out its competitors. Further, the extreme technical difficulty of reverse-engineering complex file formats--including legal obstacles such as enforceable shrink-wrap contracts against reverse engineering, the DMCA ban on reverse engineering, and patent issues--means that it's virtually impossible for competing, interoperable, products to emerge in Autodesk's markets. The main competition for Autodesk's Fusion 360 is SolidWorks. It's possible, although not that easy, to get models back and forth.[1] There's FreeCAD. There are many low end 2D CAD programs. If you're building something bigger than a house or more complicated than a keyboard, though, you probably want a pro product. [1] https://www.buildercentral.com/solidworks-vs-fusion-360/ https://www.buildercentral.com/solidworks-vs-fusion-360/
  - wappa 6y ago
    FreeCAD likely helps Autodesk's position - when freecad is so crap, you will likely just pay for autocad/or/other than even looking at alternatives, because you have been already so frustrated.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
FWIW you can address all of your criticisms by expanding the problem from VCs to non-founder investors generally. All of your examples are publicly-traded companies. > The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. E.g. Look at COVID causing some colleges/universities cancelling in-person classes and refuse to refund tuition fees claiming that "video instruction" is same quality of education. The money came from students and not VCs. You can't blame VCs for that. I'm not sure this one fits, because the universities are between a rock and a hard place. They've switched to "video instruction" but none of their expenses have gone away because they're still maintaining a campus and about the same level of staffing since they expect to switch back to it in the not too distant future. But if their costs haven't gone down, it's pretty hard for them to charge less without going under.
- bmitc 6y ago
  I have seen professors mention that their prep time has multiplied since they are now producing lectures rather than giving them live. They now need to deal with video production, remote homework and test submissions and returns, live lecture production, tech issues, etc. https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1279489089063079938?s=20 https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1279489089063079938?... Here’s some more interesting discussion. https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1288218327127666690?s=20 https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1288218327127666690?... https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/1297138489138569218?s=20 https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/129713848913856921... https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/1301281640560447491?s=20 https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/130128164056044749... Although I definitely feel for students, because prices for education are just insane in general. We should not be forcing debt upon our young people. But both professors and students are along for the tough ride.
ssalazar 6y ago
Capital and expectations for growth are the common denominator between these examples. Building a business and making money doesn't mandate user hostility; hockey-stick or growth in a saturated market does.
scarface74 6y ago
Microsoft Office has become much better and more popular since they started focusing on subscriptions and they don’t have to keep forcing more useless features to convince people to upgrade. Office 365 is a great deal for $99 - 6 users each with 1TB of storage and I can use it with my iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows PC etc.

by jasode 6y ago

EarthIsHome 6y ago

> The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. Let's take this further and ask What is the driving factor for humans to want to accumulate more money? I think the human founders are responding to external pressures that incentivize the accumulation of wealth.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
R.e. "external" pressures. This explanation does not seem very efficient. There are tangible benefits to wealth accumulation. Wealth can afford its owner many kinds of different pleasures that are less available to the less wealthy. It also protects from many harms. All organisms in existence are avaricious to some extent or another, because the ancestral environment favors this trait.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  There are also tangible disbenefits - like having your home destroyed by climate change, or having your democracy hollowed out, having to live with the risk of bankruptcy if you get ill. Never mind the loss of online privacy. The problem is that raising these as the real issues they are puts you outside the dominant ideology. If you don't do it anonymously you are in real danger of discrimination during job searches. And if you do it forcefully and polemically enough - to the point where you start getting an activist audience instead an audience of passive click-consumers you can monetise - you'll attract more direct forms of attention. Humans are avaricious, but humans are not only avaricious. Our ability to cooperate and to look after each other is one of the key evolutionary developments that led to to our success as a species. From this point view neoliberalism, nationalism, and other competitive/extractive ideologies are an unwelcome return to dumb competitive animality. Some individuals win big, but the species as a whole damages its long-term survival prospects - literally and eventually very tangibly.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    > There are also tangible disbenefits - like having your home destroyed by climate change, or having your democracy hollowed out, having to live with the risk of bankruptcy if you get ill. These all seem like things wealth protects from, which helps explain why founders and all other humans will tend to want to accumulate it.
    - bergstromm466 6y ago
      > These all seem like things wealth protects from This sounds to me like Silicon Valley solutionism. Getting rich only works for some time in a world with widespread crop failures and the many other effects of global heating. [1] When that happens I'd say it's only a matter of time before the pitchforks and guillotines come out... “I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.” ― Eduardo Galeano [1] https://archive.is/mXJ1B https://archive.is/mXJ1B

ohazi 6y ago

> The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. At least for software, we know of one solution that works: free (as in speech) software. Still made by humans, but usually without the self-serving greed, and if any of that does turn up, you never lose access to the last-good version and source, in case you or someone else wants to fork it. That's not to say that there aren't valid complaints about the availability and usability of free software. There are some free applications that can do amazing things, but are genuinely less intuitive than comparable commercial software. It's not surprising that users who aren't free software diehards don't want to use these tools. There are also entire ecosystems where free software just isn't a thing, e.g. phone software and hosted user services.

mawise 6y ago
This type of thinking has been a huge motivator to my side project as I try to envision what a more user-centric internet could look like. The core being self-hosted internet infrastructure--my project being an open-source, easy-to-run, _private_ blog. https://simpleblogs.org https://simpleblogs.org
jokethrowaway 6y ago
That's not sustainable. Most OSS nowadays is produced by big companies looking at OSS as a way to retain or capture more engineering talent. It somehow works for small individuals because having a nice github can be useful to get a job or bypass the ridiculous interviewing process of the day. A few heroes barely live off donations from wealthy companies and patreons, others sell development courses on the side. The real problem is that companies in our society grow too much and we end up with a few outliers companies and hordes of employees. Unfortunately, as soon as a company gets money or becomes successful enough to lobby the government for more regulations, they can effectively make it harder for competitor to pop up. The fact that starting a business is a logistic hassle because of corporate taxes is another barrier. I'd like to see more micro companies and individuals providing value to society instead of giant corporations. OSS can be a part of that, but it doesn't have to be.
- 6y ago

ponker 6y ago

I don’t agree on your “user hostile” examples outside of Intuit but agree with your take —- founders know what VC is. The reason they started the company in the first place is to get rich.

Ericson2314 6y ago

What sort of "root cause" analysis goes for the human nature of a founders? Yikes, are we that overly-focused on the individual? Let my say the obvious, all those non-VC companies are publicly held. So let me get to the heart of the matter, if you have investors, they will demand returns on their investment. And if you don't have investors, you will have to compete externally (e.g. users) and internally (e.g. salaries) with those that do.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
I.e. if you want to survive, the market will keep you in lockstep with the worst of your competitors on the market. So ultimately it still boils down to "problems of unconstrained markets".

benjaminjosephw 6y ago

VCs are here both symbolic of a system that seeks outsized returns and the catalysts of that system. VC funding is the accepted model for startup success and it's very difficult to find advice on starting a serious startup that doesn't anticipate VC-style backing. As a result, it's become the norm and an obvious starting point. Capturing the culture of early-stage startups in this way has lead to a monoculture where even communities like Indie Hackers advocates for VC funding[0]. VCs aren't literally the problem but they represent and reinforce the broken status-quo. I'm interested in the properties of the system we've created and participate in and so this is a generalized observation. There are always counterexamples to generalisations but that's not to say that there isn't something valuable about the generalisation itself. I'm not arguing that without VCs founders would be perfect altruists but there could be other funding models that create fewer conflicts of interest between producers and consumers of technology. [0] - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-doesn-t-mean-bootstrapped-anymore-a88300c012 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-doesn-t-mean-bootstr...

yerabotarry 6y ago

> The issue is the company founders, not the VCs. The issue is the veneer behind these IoT, Social media, Internet time wasters, and occasional productivity boosters are wearing off. There is no competition (less VC money) to serve the community better and the real reason for these companies existing remains bare. All they want to do is monitor you, manipulate you, get your money, and kill your productivity. The user always will lose outside of the occasional paragdim shift or productivity boost. As it stands now there is no vision to change existing platforms thus in this age the user will always lose. There is no reason to contribute anything to the online sphere (outside of technical areas) as it is like pissing in the wind.

bleepblorp 6y ago

The real problem here is excessive governmental tolerance of monopolies and the lack of an adequate regulatory/legal regime to protect end-users from harms caused by vendor-lock in. All of the companies you mention have near-monopolies in their respective sectors. Hundreds of years of economic history show that monopolies are extremely harmful to their customers. Autodesk is only able to get away with what it does because regulators allowed it to buy out its competitors. Further, the extreme technical difficulty of reverse-engineering complex file formats--including legal obstacles such as enforceable shrink-wrap contracts against reverse engineering, the DMCA ban on reverse engineering, and patent issues--means that it's virtually impossible for competing, interoperable, products to emerge in Autodesk's markets. Microsoft continues to be a problem because the US government decided, 25 years ago, that stopping Microsoft from abusing its operating system monopoly was unAmerican. Companies, like people, follow incentives. The incentives created by strong copyright and patent law, combined with the deliberate unenforcement of anti-trust laws in the United States, prevent competition. Without competition, customers always lose. Getting users a fair deal means changing the rules that define the software market to consider the needs of users rather than only the wants of vendors.

Animats 6y ago
Autodesk is only able to get away with what it does because regulators allowed it to buy out its competitors. Further, the extreme technical difficulty of reverse-engineering complex file formats--including legal obstacles such as enforceable shrink-wrap contracts against reverse engineering, the DMCA ban on reverse engineering, and patent issues--means that it's virtually impossible for competing, interoperable, products to emerge in Autodesk's markets. The main competition for Autodesk's Fusion 360 is SolidWorks. It's possible, although not that easy, to get models back and forth.[1] There's FreeCAD. There are many low end 2D CAD programs. If you're building something bigger than a house or more complicated than a keyboard, though, you probably want a pro product. [1] https://www.buildercentral.com/solidworks-vs-fusion-360/ https://www.buildercentral.com/solidworks-vs-fusion-360/
- wappa 6y ago
  FreeCAD likely helps Autodesk's position - when freecad is so crap, you will likely just pay for autocad/or/other than even looking at alternatives, because you have been already so frustrated.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

FWIW you can address all of your criticisms by expanding the problem from VCs to non-founder investors generally. All of your examples are publicly-traded companies. > The real root cause of "user hostility" is that companies are run by humans and humans are self-serving and want to make more money. E.g. Look at COVID causing some colleges/universities cancelling in-person classes and refuse to refund tuition fees claiming that "video instruction" is same quality of education. The money came from students and not VCs. You can't blame VCs for that. I'm not sure this one fits, because the universities are between a rock and a hard place. They've switched to "video instruction" but none of their expenses have gone away because they're still maintaining a campus and about the same level of staffing since they expect to switch back to it in the not too distant future. But if their costs haven't gone down, it's pretty hard for them to charge less without going under.

bmitc 6y ago
I have seen professors mention that their prep time has multiplied since they are now producing lectures rather than giving them live. They now need to deal with video production, remote homework and test submissions and returns, live lecture production, tech issues, etc. https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1279489089063079938?s=20 https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1279489089063079938?... Here’s some more interesting discussion. https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1288218327127666690?s=20 https://twitter.com/robertghrist/status/1288218327127666690?... https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/1297138489138569218?s=20 https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/129713848913856921... https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/1301281640560447491?s=20 https://twitter.com/stevenstrogatz/status/130128164056044749... Although I definitely feel for students, because prices for education are just insane in general. We should not be forcing debt upon our young people. But both professors and students are along for the tough ride.

ssalazar 6y ago

Capital and expectations for growth are the common denominator between these examples. Building a business and making money doesn't mandate user hostility; hockey-stick or growth in a saturated market does.

scarface74 6y ago

Microsoft Office has become much better and more popular since they started focusing on subscriptions and they don’t have to keep forcing more useless features to convince people to upgrade. Office 365 is a great deal for $99 - 6 users each with 1TB of storage and I can use it with my iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows PC etc.