It's just sad
It is true
Fully agree with the article. At least from what I am experiencing, Google experience has been deteriorating. The quality of the search results is really a concern. I sometimes spend a whole minute to find the relevant results. Not to mention the sponsored articles that fill up the top 10 results at least. Facebook? I stopped using it years ago, so no complaint š Amazon and the junk products with obscure comments are another category.
Not sure if its a common experience but Google maps is becoming unusable especially on web.
Google maps has gotten so bad
100%
The people who cared and did a good job with these products in the past got paid and moved on
This needs to be repeated. Thatās exactly what Iāve seen.
Where do they end up going though?
This describes my exact experience this weekend searching for things. I put my terms in quotes too and still brought up confusingly low quality matches and took forever. I find myself going to Reddit now to ask for suggestions/advice on products. Also now EVERYTHING is made in/comes from China and is cheap. I bought 2 cool looking lamps from ads on Facebook and Amazon and both were so cheap looking when they arrived. Itās just feels like a big scam.
Most important formula in business: P = E/(r-g) The Price, P, of a business equals the earnings, E, divided by the investors expected rate of return, r, minus growth rate, g. Tech companies have had years of focus on g. If they can grow at a rate that is about as high or higher than an investors desired rate of return, then P grows to infinity regardless of earnings. Problem is that suddenly there is no more cheap money available to fuel growth, and on top of that, r has gone through the roof as interest rates rise and risk free returns of 5% can be had. Suddenly these companies need to pivot from a growth first strategy to a earnings strategy, which means gutting their core products with shameless cash grabs.
I donāt even think itās capitalism (narrator: it is) itās just this stupid expectation that shareholders have of companies to constantly grow and it incentivizes so many bad decisions.
Thatās capitalism
Canāt believe i never realized being beholden to shareholders is a baked in feature of capitalism. Iām just now reading about the new category of āstakeholder capitalismā which just sounds like ācapitalism except without being a sociopathā (of course in practice all of these companies have sociopathed the ānot being a sociopathā partā¦ see carbon credits).
But, but, but... it can't possibly be a bad product when the design is... DAtA drIVen!!!
Agreed, though Alexa was never good and amazon.com has actually gotten better. AWS is a confusing mess
Too many services
Thanks Amazon. I feel this mess with products has to be blamed on product managers that have become out of touch with customers and as the article highlights focus on pushing cool stuff.