Stable products that just work

Earlier today, I saw someone on Mastodon posting about how much money a company could make if they just said “We’re going to build a product that will work the way you expect it to and keep doing that” and then stuck to that promise. 

I am not linking to the post because 1) I wish this person were right and 2) I don’t want to pile on them.

The problem is that, not matter how much you and I say we would want that sort of thing, there is no incentive for companies to actually do it. Any CEO who suggested doing this sort of thing would be immediately sacked by their board and replaced with someone committed to an ever-expanding user base and perpetually growing recurring revenue, because that is what the investors want.

Furthermore, when companies do build a relatively stable product, there is a nontrivial number of customers who get upset because the product is getting stale and why aren’t they providing updates and new features? There are plenty of people who would insist that these kind of demands are only manufactured by the tech industry and the pliant press, but that always sounds like a false-consciousness argument to me, and I tend to be pretty skeptical of those.

I think the people who are on about “slow tech” and whatnot—as much as I might agree with and be one of them—vastly underestimate the degree to which we are non-representative weirdos. I am unconvinced that most of the mass public actually would want this sort of thing and even if they did, we would have to contend with a commercial and financial economy that has figured out a way to keep profits rolling in utterly disconnected from what buyers of their goods and services actually want.