4 ms·

I agree in general, but this: the public wants constant innovation Seems less true to me than "VCs, entrepeneurs, middle management and MBAs want constant inn

I agree in general, but this: the public wants constant innovation Seems less true to me than "VCs, entrepeneurs, middle management and MBAs want constant innovation", which is to say "capitalists want constant innovation". The constant churn is a sales-driven impulse to capture more of the market, and it's organizations throwing endless (and mostly pointless) change in order to move a few more units or renew a few more subscriptions. It's not the consumers who think software isn't finished, it's the people selling it. Think about Office 97 and what you do today. Has anything added to MS Office since then mattered at a wide scale?

lr4444lr 4y ago
Fair enough: s/public/consumer
thot_experiment 4y ago
Correct, the problem is capitalism and intellectual property. The capitalist system simply has no way of dealing with the fact that writing documents or spreadsheets is a thing we can more or less solve once and give to everyone for free at no additional cost. That's the reality of the situation, the problem is the idea of ownership as applied to things that can be infinitely duplicated at no cost. It's a growing disconnect between reality and the capitalist economy. I have no solution, but I know it doesn't make sense to own intangibles in the way copyright/patents/intellectual property and other bullshit like nfts are attempting to impose on a digital world the reality of which is fundamentally different from the tangible one. Creating artificial scarcity is wrong.
musicale 4y ago
Capitalists want money, and they usually do whatever makes money. In software, constant churn and superficial redesign seems to make more money than reliability, security, and core improvements. Be that as it may, Office 365/Teams are probably new since Office 97. Arguably it wasn't a Microsoft innovation per se and was a response to Google Docs/Slack/etc. but internet/cloud/web-based collaborative editing integrated with group chat, video conferencing, and document sharing are probably new features since Office 97 that are somewhat useful, even if they don't work particularly well.

lr4444lr 4y ago

Fair enough: s/public/consumer

thot_experiment 4y ago

Correct, the problem is capitalism and intellectual property. The capitalist system simply has no way of dealing with the fact that writing documents or spreadsheets is a thing we can more or less solve once and give to everyone for free at no additional cost. That's the reality of the situation, the problem is the idea of ownership as applied to things that can be infinitely duplicated at no cost. It's a growing disconnect between reality and the capitalist economy. I have no solution, but I know it doesn't make sense to own intangibles in the way copyright/patents/intellectual property and other bullshit like nfts are attempting to impose on a digital world the reality of which is fundamentally different from the tangible one. Creating artificial scarcity is wrong.

musicale 4y ago

Capitalists want money, and they usually do whatever makes money. In software, constant churn and superficial redesign seems to make more money than reliability, security, and core improvements. Be that as it may, Office 365/Teams are probably new since Office 97. Arguably it wasn't a Microsoft innovation per se and was a response to Google Docs/Slack/etc. but internet/cloud/web-based collaborative editing integrated with group chat, video conferencing, and document sharing are probably new features since Office 97 that are somewhat useful, even if they don't work particularly well.