Demand goes down over time but the board expects increasing results. It's the capitalism.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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See also: everything else under capitalism
Strong anti-trust enforcement is the key. As long as the major cloud providers are actually competing, it shouldn't be an issue.
Price-fixers need to face real consequences, not like the slap on the wrist that they got for fixing the price of ebooks at 10$.
She's over reached a couple times and shot themselves in the foot, but Lina Khan is a boss.
In an e-mail to [Steve] Jobs, Cue attributed Random House’s capitulation in part to 'the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store this week.'"
Well we all knew those things happened but it's the first time I see proof.
Software gets more expensive over time when you write it like spaghetti coded crap in a "move fast and break things" environment where you build so much technical debt that you can't touch anything without breaking 5 other things, and suddenly even simple changes take hundreds of developer hours, which you don't have because half your team is fighting bugs.
Luckily all of our most critical services run on well-developed platforms that get the time and resources they need to be durable and maintainable over time. (biggest /s I've ever written)
Fucking Factorio engineers everywhere, I swear.
I don’t think a better analogy could possibly be made for this. Congrats, you win
This is unfortunately true... Tho what is driving the rent seeking isnt tech debt its greed
eBooks and digital rentals should cost a fraction of their physical counterparts, but instead they cost more because of ~~greed~~ convenience.
The expensive part of making books is not the paper. My wife is an independent author and between editing, typesetting, cover design, etc. she spent about $1500 to publish each of her books.
While she could price her books at $1, that would present her with a few problems.
Firstly, people often value things based on what they've paid for them, so pricing your book too low makes people assume it is of poor quality.
Secondly, having positive reviews is extremely important for indie authors because the Almighty Algorithm will reward you or punish you based on the book's rating. Other indie authors she has talked to have seen a noticable decline in their book's rating after Amazon put it on sale and a bunch of people who might not have otherwise read it started buying copies. If you've ever worked retail or food service, you probably know that bargain hunters are often the people who are least reasonable and hardest to please. If the book is too cheap, you may attract an audience that harms its reputation.
Finally, trying to sell 2000+ copies of a book is pretty daunting for small authors and that's about what it would take to break even at $1 per copy.
Could big publishers and well known authors sell books for a buck? Probably. But for the majority of authors who aren't making their living by writing and only sell a few hundred copies ever, that's not really realistic.
Those are reasonable statements, but it doesn't explain why the digital equivalents cost MORE than their physical counterparts. Especially considering there's no manufacturing, distribution, shipping, storage, etc.. Sure, servers and bandwidth cost money, but nowhere near what an entire physical distribution chain costs. It's pennies on the dollar.
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Ebooks are less convenient because once you buy and read it you're stuck with it and can't resell.
Books can be had second hand for dirt cheap, too. For ebook you're paying full price.
True, but I can't get a paperback at midnight, while laying in bed, and have it in my hands 10 seconds later.
No, they cost more because of Steve Jobs.
This is your reminder that that man was utter trash.
I don't need reminders but I love thorough paper trails.
I also read manuals if you're wondering. No sarcasm.
Manuals are cool though.
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This is what I don't get. Progress and tech are supposed to make things cheaper and more efficient, not more expensive and resource hungry.
Absolutely they do, which is why the competition could not compete. Once the whole market is dominated by a few companies, it lets them get a little more creative with how they price things, and a little lazier with their coding practices.
The rebound effect summarised
I was renting a water heater. It had been installed in my house in the early 1980s. And the rental contract had been handed down from home owner to home owner.
But there was never an attempt at maintenance, even upon request I got told "there's no need, there's nothing to maintain on it." but they kept increasing the rental cost year over year "because of inflation". It had been paid off for decades! What do you mean you need to charge more? What exactly am I paying for? My water heater is just a number in your books. You have zero costs for it!
... Why would you rent a way heater, in a home you own? Is the house a school or something???
I've since replaced it with a water heater I bought outright. For a while I wasn't aware that you could just buy a heater. So I just gritted my teeth and paid up.
But my point was the weird and pointless increase of fees.
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Cloud costs are going down
¿Huh?
Companies often have less new stuff to add
They never run out of stuff to add. Give any company enough resources and you would see weird and completely unrelated stuff attached to their products. I kid you not, I can apparently get a vet appointment in a taxi app, and my bank is now selling clothes and.... car parts? While the bank part of the app literally has no option to filter out only incoming transactions. Priorities, I guess...
this is what they do when they run out of stuff to add, yes
Yeah companies need to stop being allowed to be multiple industries.
Like why does every department store have a credit card now? They should be using their profits to pay their employees, not loaning it out at insane interest rates.
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There was another thread recently about what happened in your life that made you no longer feel like a child. I think for me one of those things was realizing that the price of things has very little to do at all with the cost of creating that thing.
Price = Cost of Materials + (Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man) + Cost of Labor.
It's Econ 101
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The word he's describing is called "enshittification".
No, it's monopoly capitalism. A certain Mr. Marx from Germany had a few things to say about it.
One consequence of monopoly capitalism is businesses pursuing growth in revenue more aggressively than growth in user base.
When the market is saturated, all you can do to pursue growth is to increase unit margin. This eventually leads to production of "fictitious capital" as a stand in for real capital (as paper assets cost virtually nothing to produce).
Das Kapital goes into lengthy detail about this process. Specifically, the "how much does it cost to make a coat" chapter gets into it in (exhaustive) detail.
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Enshittification has nothing to do with pricing.
It's about market capture and the resulting lack of choices allowing market holders to maximize profits by degrading product performance. This can occur even when the product has no price.
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Going to stroke this image for the next time I see some dumb cunt using the term enshitification unironically.
Greedflation is the word you're looking for.
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