Quality is a hard sell in big tech

https://www.pcloadletter.dev/blog/big-tech-quality/

by ronbenton • 6 months ago

7 3 6 months ago

Enshitification follows becoming a monopoly or a cartel.

For example, how is any scrappy, quality focused startup going to unseat Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc? Even Apple seems to be heading down that path.

ronbenton• 6 months ago

I agree this is a result of monopolization or more specifically "lock-in." I spent some time at Microsoft making products in their 365 suite and it was frankly known that enterprise contracts with us were a form of lock-in--the idea of moving a 100K employee workforce off of Microsoft 365 and onto something else is nearly impossible. So management didn't worry much about quality.

pseudohadamard• 6 months ago

It's not even that. I work for a company run by engineers that emphasises quality over time-to-market and other BS. The fact that it's privately held helps a lot. It's pretty much the opposite of "move fast and break things", maybe "do it right the first time" would be an appropriate motto.

And most customers really don't care. They want it right now, just make it work, and they want to pay as little as possible for it. We could ship absolute crap like some of our competitors do and still make a lot of money, possibly more money actually since you can churn out superficially feature-filled crap much quicker than a well-designed, tested product.

The only significant benefit from doing it right when others aren't is that when customers pay for support contracts it's free money for us because there's almost never any need for support.

Quality is a hard sell in big tech

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