Requirements analysis changes as you move from B2B to B2C and to CC (what I call consumer communism) As a young engineer working on bigger institutional projec

Requirements analysis changes as you move from B2B to B2C and to CC (what I call consumer communism) As a young engineer working on bigger institutional projects we followed the classic waterfall processes, fact-finding, system analysis, separating out functional and non-functional, stakeholder mediation and so on. Stuff mainly worked and we had gruntled clients. Although things took many years, and ran over budget, but not too much. Getting into smartphone related startups after 2000 I saw a wholly different culture. It wasn't just the Agile thinking, but the movement to mobile always-on tech made almost everything part of the maintenance phase. Companies no longer even try to ship finished products. Anything can be added or changed after the product is in the "consumers" (not customers) hands. Time to market and sheer speed of development has changed the requirements landscape. After 2015 I noticed a far more disturbing shift. Requirements are not even part of the picture. The customer will "have what they are given and like it". Why? As we know, for many ventures the profitable part of business is not giving value to the customer but extracting value _from_ them to sell to other businesses. The product is merely a vehicle for foisting features upon users who are made a captive audience via lock-in, legislation that mandates products or complexity that hides function. In this "hostile technology world" any requirements come from parent companies or partners in the rent extraction game, or are dreamed up internally. The job of marketing is to push/sell these features as "necessary and inevitable" and of customer/public relations (if it exists) to deflect disgruntled consumers or assuage their fears and disappointments with empty assurances.