The extension to this is shareholders have made everything worse. Instead of a company making a product that does what the customer needs driving purchasing dec

The extension to this is shareholders have made everything worse. Instead of a company making a product that does what the customer needs driving purchasing decisions and thus revenue, companies are now being held hostage to be constantly driving revenue number growth. This is easily done by implementing subscriptions or implementing hardware technologies with a limited lifetime. For example, companies weren't happy with just having to replace your phone every 3 or so years so they removed the headphone jacks from phones to drive the sales of Bluetooth headphones that have built in batteries. Those batteries have a limited lifetime before the device has to be replaced, while a pair of wired headphones could theoretically last decades if cared for or repaired. On the software side any device or software that has to connect to a server to work properly is merely a rental dependent on how long a company wants to continue supporting it. Now, I'm not against this in cases where it is only realistic to use it for a limited period of time and the cloud provides meaningful usefulness, but there is no excuse for why many devices have any sort of smart or cloud connections.