That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people? I guess founders only talk about this stuff in the startup stage.
If all these corporations will concern themselves with is "line go up" then it's time for society to step in and seriously constrain what they're allowed to do in order to drive that line up. Frankly, corporations making line go up by shoving advertising into everything everywhere aren't adding a lot of value. They're just increasing audiovisual pollution and that's an extremely charitable interpretation of their activities. What I actually think is they're violating my mind every single time they show me an advertisement. My attention is mine, it's not theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. I couldn't care less how much money it costs them, it should be illegal for them to do it.
> That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people?
Unironically, they've already done that.
Microsoft put a PC on every desk, running Microsoft software.
Facebook connected the world to all their friends and relatives.
Amazon first revolutionized e-commerce, making it possible to buy almost anything from almost anywhere. Then they revolutionized server computing, making it possible for anyone to spin up a software backend and scale it out without buying or leasing your own servers.
Apple got pocket sized general purpose computers into the pockets of the majority of people in the world (through iPhone and inspiring Android).
Google enabled people to find pretty much any piece of human knowledge or information.
The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.
>Microsoft put a PC on every desk, running Microsoft software.
As someone who was in the industry in the 90s and 00s, and saw just how many man-hours were wasted in dealing with problems caused by MS's buggy and insecure software, I don't really count this as "improving the world and people's lives". Even at the time, there were far better alternatives available; they just didn't have the same marketing or lock-in advantages.
I'll grant you the stuff about FB, Amazon, and Google though, and maybe Apple with their iPhone.
>The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.
Yep, this is the problem: unsustainability. These companies should have been able to shift into a "utility provider" type status where they don't really grow much (except from expanding population, or new untapped global markets), where they can simply provide a fairly constant service and have a regular revenue stream.
> I don't really count this as "improving the world and people's lives".
Microsoft provided the operating system that allowed the commoditised IBM PC, and later laptops, to launch.
Without this, no Google, no Amazon and no FB.
Put another way, if every workstation still cost $5k and up to own, far fewer people would have bothered in the first place.
No complaints about your views on Microsoft software ;) I'd argue I'm not sure Google or Amazon are "making the world a better place" when you get into the details, but this is purely about the wider impacts of their strategy.
> That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people? I guess founders only talk about this stuff in the startup stage.
These were lies calculated to help them recruit idealistic young people, who lack the experience to disregard companies making grandiose claims about themselves and their motives.
Most of the most successful corporations/businesses have vision/innovation to begin with, they do create useful things that people didn't know they wanted but once they see it they do.
After a while though, the business gets big enough that no new innovation can actually move the needle on the businesses revenues, the people at those companies who do have ideas are better off getting paid well for some period of time and then leaving to make it themselves.
That's the stage google is in more or less, innovation won't move their bottom line very much so they're trying to extract as much as possible from their existing businesses, which basically means as many ads as possible in as many places as possible.
tech giants have the moral-teflon of their bastardized implementation of DEI. So they're obviously just and benevolent. If you think they're ratfucking their customers, then you're just a bigot who's mad about the diversity but won't say it.
If all these corporations will concern themselves with is "line go up" then it's time for society to step in and seriously constrain what they're allowed to do in order to drive that line up. Frankly, corporations making line go up by shoving advertising into everything everywhere aren't adding a lot of value. They're just increasing audiovisual pollution and that's an extremely charitable interpretation of their activities. What I actually think is they're violating my mind every single time they show me an advertisement. My attention is mine, it's not theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. I couldn't care less how much money it costs them, it should be illegal for them to do it.