The article speaks of a tipping point and has aided in pulling it forward.
Unlimited greed is what eventually sinks a company. We saw it with AltaVista in the '90's (when the search results were all ads) and Google is slowly repeating this opening a space for a competitor to jump into.
> Unlimited greed is what eventually sinks a company. We saw it with AltaVista in the '90's (when the search results were all ads) and Google is slowly repeating this opening a space for a competitor to jump into.
I'm not sure this is a helpful characterization. Greed is also what helped the same companies get where they were before they went to shit.
The problem is that you can only grow so far in a market before the only way to keep the appearance of growth is to make your product worse, either by producing it cheaper (like Toblerone) or by monetizing it harder (e.g. ads in paid video subscriptions).
There are always people working in these companies that are trying to get a good product to a customer. These are slowly replaced or overruled by A/B testers who want to maximize profit. I think that process shifts the company from actually doing a service, to greed.
I dont think this is the whole picture. It is generally true that selling products and making a profit is the goal for both.
Optimizing the best result for each query can result in a terrible result for the minority of shoppers for that query. More importantly, it can lead to a terrible result for the majority of shoppers across many queries.
The problem is other considerations that A/B testing metrics often leave out (Satisfaction in the long term, in searches that dont lead to sale, and across multiple changes)
That is to say, on average most shoppers might want cheap shit for a given search. but sometimes, they might want a different/better product and get frustrated.
If you over optimize for the typical use case, you might still lose the typically user because they not typical in every way and every day.
Not sure about A/B testers, but that is essentially the issue. Steve Jobs even talked about it back in the 1990s, about tech companies and markets of the 70s and 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
Yeah, it's like if you sell a multi-tool and realize that 90% of the time people just use the screwdriver. AB testing would tell you that you should make all the tools a screwdriver, but then you would have a shit multi-tool and no one would buy it except people that need a screwdriver.
This is what Amazon has done. They took their Marketplace and turned it into a search engine for the cheapest drop shipped product
>Coverage for drops, spills and breakdowns (plans vary)
If you click through you'll see that the plan specifically excludes drops and spills. Two of the three things they advertise for.
Like that's just fraud and someone at Amazon green-lit this knowing that it's just fraud. It's not optimization gone haywire. It's discovering that you can make money scamming people and not having any qualms about scamming your customers.
And the problem is that the the snake has now reached its tail.
Maybe there are specific conditions, like it might help laundering or help deter competitors from entering their website, whatever that this scheme has a net positive gain for them, but this is insanity.
I would describe it as the company has changed its priority from customer acquisition to customer monetization. When the company starts tuning by touching only its monetization knob, it slowly starts descending into death spiral. Depending on the competition it can take weeks or decades.
Well, the difference would be "we find a niche and make a bank on it by being best at it" vs "we make a ton of money on the niche, how we can make even more?". I.e. being happy that you "made it" and continue to make the as good product vs trying to squeeze everything out of it to deliver investor returns.
Theoretically being too greedy like that should open niche for competition with better product that's less exploitative but that is really hard if the near-monopolist on market is big enough or the product is hard enough.
There's been a shift in our culture over the past century or so (though mainly, I think, since the 1980s) in how we look at the purpose of a company.
It used to be that a fairly normal, mainstream company's purpose and goals were along the lines of "We make a product or provide a service, and doing that well enough/better than our competition makes us decent money."
Nowadays, it seems to be almost expected that the way a company operates is closer to "We are here to make as much money as we possibly can. If that means we have to make a product or provide a service, OK, but that's a necessary evil to the process of making absolutely ungodly amounts of money."
Google didn't get where it was before it went to shit because of greed. They got there because of genuine technical prowess, and a willingness to sacrifice possible revenue to provide an improved experience, with things like the bare-bones main Google page (as compared to things like Yahoo!, Altavista, and Infoseek when Google first appeared, which were laden down with all kinds of crap).
When greed took over, they shifted from the former mindset to the latter, and that's when things really started to go downhill.
Unlimited greed is what eventually sinks a company. We saw it with AltaVista in the '90's (when the search results were all ads) and Google is slowly repeating this opening a space for a competitor to jump into.
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