This stifles development of things that are actually useful. It puts money and influence in the hands of people who shouldn't have either, creating bad incentives in the market and within the company. It gives marketing a gloss of false legitimacy, allowing for all the things that have us in a feverish race to the bottom.
Everything you just touted has been achieved despite the Idiocracy fan-fic that seems to be the current mission statement of corporate America.
In the webapp ecosystem, those transaction costs take the form of annoying signup pages and mail spam. Could be worse.
- Products that don't require any of this stuff.
- Products that require some form of registration since it stores user data remotely. The person registers so they may secure, modify, or remove that data. The handling of personal data should serve this role exclusively.
- Products that require some form of initial setup and onboarding will facilitate that setup for the vast majority of people. The user should still be able to bypass the onboarding in case their use case doesn't reflect the common use case.
When marketing becomes involved, things become problematic. That friendly offer of assistance to get started usually reflects marketable features rather than any form of genuine training. That collection of personal information is used to harass the person using the product rather than to facilitate the use of the product. (Heck, I have companies contacting me over a decade after I last used their product to try to make a sale.)
I think this is a really, really interesting phenomena: the human brain (perhaps when sufficiently institutionalized) exhibits some sort of fundamental bias toward disruptive UX that breaks flow and productivity, and this approach must be proven wrong, every time, on a case by case basis, and doesn't fundamentally internalize.
It's crazy: because it doesn't lead to higher sales, it's seen as a bad approach. WHY? "Just because."
If the goal of a company is to create higher sales, then it is a bad approach.
If the goal is to create a great tool used by people and not worry about adoption or supporting a large business through profit, it's probably a great idea!
- Does it actually lead to higher sales? If not, nobody is going to care about our wish for more companies to do this.
- It doesn’t work for many products. How do you just drop someone into a cloud storage product? You could give them some temporary space where they can drop some files if they want, but what do you do if they abandon them? Delete them after some time? Might confuse some customers who didn’t realize they had to actually register an account. Maybe a huge banner with a countdown would work… you start to have to solve a whole lot of problems to make it work