The Final Straw: Why Companies Replace Once-Beloved Technology Brands

https://www.functionize.com/blog/the-final-straw-why-companies-replace-once-beloved-technology-brands

by ohjeez • 8 months ago

24 17 8 months ago

hinkley2• 8 months ago

I used to make a habit of talking to coworkers who were leaving about why they left.

You have to have a pretty good reputation for discretion to get them to really talk, but I noticed a pattern in those who would.

You tend to hear their list of grievances in reverse chronological order. The last straw comes first, but if you keep them talking long enough the first straw eventually comes out.

Some of those first straws are often something pretty avoidable. The final straw can be harder to avoid but recency bias makes us focus on it in ways that don’t seem to line up with the experiences of the person who feels wronged.

I can’t say for sure if they accumulate linearly or not but it does seem like fixing the easy ones does result in longer times to last straw. But they seem so minor to the team that it can be difficult to get movement on them. And it sometimes only applies to new “customers”. Some will forgive you for things they had to deal with if nobody else has to, but that would take a lot more data points than I have to say for sure.

Mistletoe• 8 months ago

Reminds me of the broken windows theory. Fixing a few panes of early insult glass is pretty easy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

petsfed• 8 months ago

I think its not just recency bias at work, but also the broader experience that nothing changed after the first straw. If the complainant can't assemble the various issues into a coherent narrative that signals that they should leave, then they're not going to. So its not just fixing issues as they come up, its fixing the right issues before they can spread.

I worked at company where the projects I was working on kept getting cancelled. And sure, that's business, these things happen. But couple that with also being reassigned well outside of my comfort zone or job description while they looked for something new (and all of the proposed projects that would be back in line with my job title were also getting cancelled before development could even begin), I began to see a pattern.

The final straw, such as it was, was the announcement that they could no longer purchase milk for coffee in the breakroom, in an effort to save money. It wasn't that "I can't work at a place that can't afford milk for coffee", it was "this company is so bad at planning for the future that it can't even find a way to purchase milk for the breakroom, let alone drive a massive development and manufacturing effort to completion".

hinkley2• 8 months ago

There’s a sort of a chess clock that starts after the first injury. Every move adds a little more time to the clock but slowly runs down goodwill.

It does seem to be that the later the clock starts the better things go.

But analogies aside, it’s also that first incident of “did I make a mistake coming here?” And that can start with dumb logistical things like they knew you were showing up on Wednesday and they didn’t have a desk or maybe a composter ready for you.

The Gottman Institute thinks that the only emotion a relationship cannot endure is contempt. So far I haven’t encountered any meaningful counterexamples.

jonathaneunice• 8 months ago

That’s fine - until it isn’t.

This covers *so* much ground. It's utterly not predictive—but in retrospect, it often explains everything.

the_snooze• 8 months ago

In other circumstances, they make avoidable mistakes, such as deploying confusing user interfaces or choosing greed over customer delight.

This is exactly what got me to stop using Spotify (for their insistence on spamming podcasts on the home screen, when I'm there solely for music) and music streaming as a whole (for my playlists randomly losing songs). Buying the audio files and maintaining them on my own hardware is less BS.

pirates• 8 months ago

I think it’s bs that spotify premium still allows ads to be played during podcasts. It’s similar to youtube premium. I’m paying to not have ads, and you still serve me ads. I don’t care that they’re “in roll” or from the creator instead of the platform. That’s a distinction without a difference. Figure it out or I stop paying. And yes, I stopped paying.

captain_coffee2• 8 months ago

That is literally the reason for which I finally canceled Spotify a few years ago. At that point I was accumulating reasons to switch for the last few years but that was the last straw.

I am paying your most expensive subscription and if you would have had a more expensive / premium one I would have paid more explicitly for the service to not include ads anywhere, under any possible curcumstance. Aparently that was impossible.

Never looked back and I should have done the switch years before.

cadamsdotcom• 8 months ago

I’m paying to not have ads, and you still serve me ads.

Capitalism wins again!

shalmanese• 8 months ago

How can they prevent in roll ads? YouTube Premium subscribers still see in roll ads. If you don’t want them, subscribe to the podcasts Patreon and they’ll provide you a custom RSS with no ads.

bezoz• 8 months ago

Microsoft Windows is doomed isn’t it? It fits every single category in your list

ohjeez• 8 months ago

A "version" function may play a part in this. Such as the people who hang onto Windows XP instead of upgrading because....

But it's still easier to stick with the provider (Microsoft) than to look elsewhere.

captain_coffee2• 8 months ago

At this point Microsoft Windows (at least the latest version of Win11) is borderline unusable for any sane technology professional.

arexxbifs• 8 months ago

Interesting examples with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, which were both dominant for about 10 years during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, Microsoft has been dominant in the same segment - for a whopping 30-35 years. During this time, they've made massive, unpopular interface overhauls, released products that nearly everyone dislikes but still has to use for some reason (Teams comes to mind), offer basically zero end user support and have moved from one-off license purchases to SaaS subscriptions.

Either Microsoft has managed to get it "just right" for more than three decades, or there's something else at play, too.

s1mplicissimus• 8 months ago

I think this "something else" is called something along the lines of "monopoly", "market domination", "entrenched in politics & military", "embrace extend extinguish" or "buying everything that could potentially become competition"

karmakurtisaani• 8 months ago

As someone who has to use a lot of MS products in my work, I can confirm this "something else" has very little to do with software quality.

vkou• 8 months ago

released products that nearly everyone dislikes but still has to use for some reason (Teams comes to mind),

Principal-agent problem. The dumbass that is buying Teams for your company isn't the front-line grunt that has to use it.

The Final Straw: Why Companies Replace Once-Beloved Technology Brands

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