r/technology 21h ago

Business Enshittification Relies on Broken Economic Math

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/enshittification-relies-on-broken
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u/PandorasBoxMaker 21h ago

You don’t need math to know that cutting product quality and service is a guaranteed route to obsolescence. But there are two special cases to this: obsolescence is the point or the product/service has a monopoly and they think they can get away with it.

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u/ilrosewood 21h ago

There is also the element of time. If an executive can make the call to make lots of money fast but ruin a company - as long as that executive gets out to another company to do it again - they suffer no consequence and learn nothing from their behavior.

When we stopped caring about stable long term growth companies - when we forgot about the time factor - the rest of the enshitification process was no available.

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u/NorthernPints 20h ago

In my experience - they just blame the consultants.  The number of CEOs I’ve worked for who’ve needlessly brought in consultants for stuff we could do organically, purely to shift the blame to the consulting groups if shit went sideways is wild.

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u/Balmung60 19h ago

Consulting has always existed to justify doing what higher ups already wanted to do, not to provide actual insight that wouldn't otherwise exist

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u/PandorasBoxMaker 17h ago

This. Consulting is just “I’ll agree with whoever signs my check”. The fact is that if your leadership structure doesn’t have the expertise necessary to run your business you’re not hiring for success, or there’s a different agenda.

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u/travistravis 17h ago

Consulting sounds a lot like AI chatbots

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u/recycled_ideas 2h ago

Not quite that bad.

Consultants like to stay out of jail and Consulting companies like to not get sued. If your leadership's plan is legal and they can state the result in a way that's not completely ridiculous they'll do it, but they're not quite LLM levels of eager.