This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition, but competition eventually leads to winners that then consolidate their positions and we end up with no real choices.
You're telling me people would pick a worse OS because they don't care even if they had real options? I don't believe that for a second.
We very much do have options. I haven't had Windows on a personal machine since 2011.
The fact that governments allow Microsoft to abuse its position to force OEMs to install Windows is the biggest problem. This would never happen in a market where regulation ensures healthy competition.
Unfortunately this also allowed the USA to have companies so large that they basically control the government, changing this now will require massive political will and a political body untethered from corporate interests. I really don't see that happening in the USA, it's been thoroughly captured after so many years driving on that path.
Google hasn't enticed the big entrenched MS orgs to move over to Workspace, so if Google can't how can a smaller startup ever hope to accomplish that in the face of these behemoths that can just outlast them in a race to the bottom until they are insolvent or get bought by said behemoths?
Microsoft doesn't just sell an OS, or some services, they sell "IT in a box"
Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.
Now tell me how that competition enshittified eating at restaurants?
For me, nothing stands out. If a restaurant charges nonsense fees, under-staffs to increase profits, reduce portions with the same value, etc. I can simply go to another one. Restaurants that enshittify will almost inevitably close.
But if we look at a closely related industry like the food delivery apps, we see the same exact signs of enshittification we see on the tech world due to monopolies (or oligopolies to be more exact) like: - Increased/hidden fees
- Increased delivery times
- Crappy apps with ads everywhere
- Ineffective review systems
- Pay-to-win search
- Dynamic pricing
They can get away with it because realistically, you don't have any other options. The cost to entry might not be that high but the network effect all but prohibits competition.
Yes, and you correctly point out: On the average restaurant visit, nothing stands out. A good restaurant only needs to provide not-terrible food and not-terrible service to be almost indistinguishable from all others. Quality of a restaurant visit is hard to measure and compare. Price is easy to measure. Thus, the rational consumer will prefer the cheaper option (and even at the same price, a restaurant with lower costs will be more profitable, thus expand more easily).
The same thing happens on Amazon and other market places: When it is difficult to compare quality, price always wins out. Some products are interchangeable with well defined specs, like a 16GB RAM stick is obviously twice as good as 8GB RAM and so it can be twice as expensive and still sell. But when I'm looking for a new light for my bicycle there are no standardized specs to compare. All the product descriptions and pictures are exaggerated. I have no reliable information to tell if the lamp that is twice as expensive is really twice as good (and from personal experience: they never are), so I'm buying the cheapest one cause I expect all of the products to be equally crappy no matter the price.
It's not Amazon's fault. This happens everywhere.
I think the desktop Linux ecosystem is an example of something healthier, but it goes too far in the other direction. There are too many options to choose from that it's hard to find the one for your needs.
A lot of windows UI design decisions are pretty good. They mess it up now and then like windows 8 (tablet design mess) disaster, especially now with WSL 2.0, it delivers everything I need.
Do I still hate it , yes for the reasons explained in this article and other stupid designed features like search index, windows defender , mix of legacy and new dialogs, for the shitty design of powershell and then the mess of mixed shells, terminal etc.
List goes on, but comparatively I’ll pick windows desktop over anything out there at the moment. It’s a personal choice but I assume majority of windows user feel this way (or cannot afford macOS :))
How can this be your takeaway when there is no channel for communication with the users? There is no signal at all so you assume what is convenient for you. But this has no bearing on actual user sentiment, its just convenience for you.
Part and parcel of the “problem” with tech people is they assume they can just fill in the gaps with their preferences and pretend they’re actually user preferences. In the rest of life this is called “bullshit”.