this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Yeah I was gonna say, there's nothing wrong with the technology itself per se, just the way it's being used/exploited.
The fact that things like Netflix/Uber/AirBnB are useful and good value when they first come out and then turn to shit later shows that they can work and be successful, they just get greedy and go sideways.
I don't know about "be successful", depending on how you measure success. All of these examples have been subsidized by cheap money for years, undercutting competition - and taking year after year of losses while they do it - for the purpose of capturing the market and driving out competitors, so that they can subsequently enact monopolistic behaviors to start actually turning a profit once customers have no other choice.
The problem is money suddenly got expensive, so now they're scrambling to find a way, any way, to turn a profit, before full market capture was achieved.
Can services like this be reasonably priced and user-friendly? Sure. Can they "succeed" / become sustainable while remaining so? Current examples indicate that's where the problem lies.
Um, no.
You have to turn a certain amount of potential energy into kinetic energy in order to provide a service that drives a customer from one location to another in an automobile. You have to squeeze a certain amount of information into the same or similar coaxial or optical or whatever-it-is-these-days cables in order to deliver a video and audio stream onto a customer's television (and pay enough for the same actors and writers to produce that media in the first place). You have to pay a certain amount in property tax, cleaning, and maintenance in order to provide a clean bed for a customer to sleep on.
The "technology" itself was at most tangential to the service being provided, and the costs of providing the service. Also, the real technology involved hasn't actually changed. A car is still a car, a co-ax is still a co-ax, and a building is still a building.
An app was never going to change physics. We were probably idiots to think it would.