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> Sadly there's been a concerted effort by the FAANGs, mainly, to turn everything into an appliance and take that power away from users. That's because user ed
by ethbr0 5y ago
> Sadly there's been a concerted effort by the FAANGs, mainly, to turn everything into an appliance and take that power away from users.
That's because user education doesn't scale or pay well.
Scale, because some users are certainly intractable idiots who can't do basic addition. But even if you solve that hard problem, what have you accomplished? You've taught users how to control their own computers.
Which ultimately compresses the margin you're able to extract by artificially limiting features in your ecosystem.
If a user can glue together a storage backend themselves, fewer of them will use your cloud storage offering.
It's far easier, simpler, and more consistent and profitable to infantilize users, carve up your feature tiers with a simple pricing strategy, and maintain high margins.
- dash2 5y agoI’m not sure the argument works that more empowered users equals less opportunity for big tech to make money. Apple is certainly pushing Shortcuts. On the whole I think that citizen programmers would still need resources and services like cloud storage, access to media, or APIs for voice recognition.
- ethbr0 5y agoThe result of user empowerment is customization. The foundation of modern big tech is standardization. Facebook, Gmail, etc. Scaling at low headcount-per-user doesn't work if your users have diverged too far from baseline, because that exponentially increases support cases and requires features for smaller sections of your population. So maybe they'd be able to pivot, but it'd certainly be a sea change to start supporting full B2C APIs vs the existing more B2B2C APIs they target (when offered at all).
- dash2 5y agoIt’s true that people want to do their own thing, but at what level? People don’t want to write their own HTML, or run their own server. They want to solve problems that matter to them. Give them the right tools and you’ll grow your platform. Think how Windows benefitted from Excel.
- ethbr0 5y agoPeople want to solve problems that matter to them, and most will not want to write their own HTML or run their own server. But some will. Windows benefited from Excel because Excel was (and is!) the most widely available IDE in most companies, and provided a ridiculous amount of functionality (too much!) via VB*. And it's a huge, fundamental, business-defining leap to say "We're going to let developers (and now users) capture more value out of our platform than we get, because we'll win in the end via growth." I honestly don't think Google is there. And Facebook and Apple sure as shit aren't.