The fundamental problem with 95% of companies, and 99% of publicly listed companies.
Being selfish is common in human nature.
But while superior products at a price point can capture a bunch of share, after that they grow at the rate of the market. Those markets have “matured”.
For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied.
This is where ideas like “growth” and ideas like “useful” diverge: raise your hand if you like Facebook or Google in 2025 more than 10-15 years ago.
Sonos (and I’m aware of the structure) “grew” right out of a sustainably profitable business with happy customers.
That reason is people like more money than less money. No one logs into their brokerage account and invests in Sonos because they have a great product that is growing (or shrinking) at the rate of the speaker market.
People want to see their year end report at least equal the broad market returns.
The directive for all business leaders is to hit those benchmark returns, not pump out a solid speaker for however many years.
And if a private business owner operates their company in a way that lags the market’s returns, then they are basically doing charity work. They’re going to have to pay a lot of cash compared to their competitors who can use RSUs to incentivize employees.
Clearly everyone likes money. We could pay them for good things rather than the transient illusion of good things.
Yes it would be imperfect. No it wouldn’t be worse than this mess. Bell Labs didn’t invent the transistor on this model, JFK didn’t send us to the moon on this model.
This “privatize the commons of a century of effective public/private partnership” model is going rather shit in fact.
Every publicly listed business already does this, in the form of stock grants and options with various targets to hit at various intervals. See bottom of page 51 for an example:
https://investor.apple.com/sec-filings/sec-filings-details/d...
It’s where all those rage bait headlines of extreme executive compensation come from, from maturing equity granted before the stock appreciated a good amount over the course of a few years.
I hate to be aggressive but it’s really pretty godawful that people let absurd, corrosive claims like this fly. There is a creeping normalcy to weird Art Laffer talking points and weird Milton Friedman Freak Offs with no evidence. Things suck for the typical person since Dick Cheney and Art Laffer started “cutting taxes”.
You’re wrong in a way that demands a complete ignorance of everything from news to history to human empathy.
This mindset needs fucking therapy and where therapy fails the legal system for a fucking change.
This is not
> There is absolutely no basis for the sweeping, extraordinary claim that “every publicly listed business” is managed and incentivized around sustainable long-term value.
There has been plenty of research into figuring out how executive compensation can be tied to longer term performance, but “sustainable long term value” is such a nebulous term, I have no idea what it could mean other than a fantasy where people are able to magically measure everything they want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation
I only meant to highlight the fact that it is standard practice at publicly listed businesses to hire consultants whose job it is to figure out how to align executives and reward them for achieving long term goals.
Maybe you think the current timetables are not long term enough, or the measures are not correct, but it’s not as if cash is being handed out Willy nilly.
We’re handing out trillions in cap for press releases.
What on God’s green earth the fuck are you talking about?
Willy nilly? Will Wonka with a chocolate factory is closer to earth.
My Google Home costs $30 second hand, don’t sound as good, but I’ve not spent a single cent on it after setting it up. What is SONOS doing?
I'm sure that at some point, Samsung or Google or Sony or some upstart will catch up, but it will be a long time before someone eliminates SONOS from contention despite this multi-year setback
It just did’t evolve very far or very fast, or even adapt pricing to better fit a rapidly changing market.
They switched away from multi-room hi-fi (or at least mid-fi) audio and users with their own hoard of digital audio to focus more on streaming services and chase the trend of little monophonic speakers. The higher-end devices remained good but ever more niche.
Then they broke everything, particularly customer trust, with the app update.
[0] I have no idea what it is actually
So while it's maybe neat that they solved fringe use cases, it's unfortunate that they failed at the basic use case of "just easily play audio from my phone"
I think that's the kicker. It was revolutionary when it came out, and it's a solid technical solution, but Sonos was novel over a decade ago.
The reason is tax law and it applies to all companies not just tech. Removing the double-taxation of dividends would fix so much of our economy.
If you run a stable, no-growth but profitable company, and each year return the profits to the owners (shareholders) in the form of a dividend, that's bad because the income is first taxed when the corporation declares it as income and then again when the shareholders receive the dividend.
If instead you don't issue the dividend, but re-invest to grow the company, then the value of the shares can increase without creating a taxable event for the shareholders.
We could avoid a lot of the boom-bust cycles, enshittification of products and other economic problems if we just structured tax law to encourage stable, profitable companies issuing boring predictable dividends instead of our current system that requires infinite growth.
Why is that bad? The first case is income to the corporation and they pay income tax on it. The second is income to the shareholder and they pay income tax on it. How is it different from the corporation's employees paying income tax on money received from the corporation?
>If instead you don't issue the dividend, but re-invest to grow the company, then the value of the shares can increase without creating a taxable event for the shareholders.
That's true as long as the shareholders never sell their shares. Once they do, it's a taxable event like the dividend.
The money paid to employees is only taxed once.
We (pretty much everywhere) tax companies on their profits, but individuals on their income. It seems unfair, it leads to some weird but accepted inequalities (like the cost of renting a house vs buying), but no alternative seems to work.
While sometimes criticized as "executives juicing the stock price because that's what their incentives are tied to", in fact investors recognise that buybacks are economically equivalent to dividends, but tax-advantaged (for exactly the reasons you gave, they don't create a taxable event for the shareholders).
One problem with buybacks is it's socially difficult for companies to replace dividends with buybacks - by convention, dividends are usually issued on a regular schedule and buybacks are ad-hoc, so "cutting dividends" is seen as a sign of a company that no longer has reliable profits. But that really is just convention and it would only take a few companies switching to normalize this.
Give a good salesperson a handwavy outline of something to sell, and they will sell it. They don't need technical accuracy for success. Yes, this is bad for customers, and makes life harder, and results in ridiculous, counterproductive, infuriating situations for IT staff, engineers, and other people who have to deal with the technical realities of every day business.
A salesperson can just mash psychological buttons in manager's brains, and they'll make the sale. The consumer, in enterprise level markets, is hardly ever the team or individual in charge of operating the technology. The consumer is the manager, or managerial team, looking to check boxes and shuffle numbers and spend $X on Y department, for which they get rewarded for a wide array of arbitrary outcomes, almost none of which have anything to do with the practical impact of the product in question on the people who end up most affected by the purchase.
If an engineer with a solid understanding of the product being sold is in charge, he's in the best place to rein in the sales and marketing teams, and to direct development based on customer reality. This probably results in lower profits, overall, but a better product, and a better reputation in the long run.
Why do you say that? My gut reaction is that the opposite is true. Salespeople must understand their customers' wants and needs in order to effectively sell! Engineers are generally a step or two removed from the customers. This may be an unpopular take on HN but I'd wager the people who spend time directly with the customers have a better chance at understanding what they want. Taken a step further, customer support probably has the best understanding of their markets' needs!
I've worked with a few developers AND sales people that didn't give a hoot about what their customers thought. In the case of Sales, they only cared about making their targets. In the case of the devs that didn't care, they spent 99% of their time doing silly (in my opinion) arguments about frameworks, design patterns, and whitespace and formatting rules in CI. Not that things like design patterns are inherently silly. But if they don't result in a better customer experience (via more stable and maintainable software, for example), then it's a waste of time.
I'm a developer by trade but have ALWAYS had an attitude of "it only matters if it's useful to the user" – and have butted heads sometimes with developers on which features to prioritize.
People working in customer support, from my experience, sort of see the anti-survivorship bias working in action. Not many people call up to say how well something works. I would agree with you though on good Salespeople (ones that do try to understand what customers need and all that, not necessarily ones that sell the most) knowing what the customer wants/needs.
I used to see this all the time at an old job where my team worked on open source client libraries for using the main product that our company sold. A decent number people seemed to think that an increasing number of tickets being filed against one of the libraries was a sign that users weren't happy with it, but it always seemed obvious to me that you couldn't easily conclude that; you might have 99 happy users with no issues for every 1 unhappy user who filed a ticket, or you might have literally only unhappy users and nobody without issues. On the other hand, getting literally zero tickets might mean that you have plenty of happy users, or it might mean you have basically no users at all.
I'd often talk to younger engineers who were interning on the team or recently joined full-time about how this dynamic informed how I approached my job; usually, we'd only hear from users who had issues, so the "goal" in some ways to was to make the software so good that you'd never hear from them. If you did hear from a user, that was a valuable opportunity where you might learn something you could do in the future to make things better the first time.
Yes. There are people who talk about product experiences that delight or whatever. Nah, the ultimate experience is one that's so flawless, so frictionless that it's completely forgettable. The user doesn't want to remember anything. They have a problem a/o need, the goal is to make it disappear w/out a trace.
I agree with your assessment, except that an engineer has the incentive to make the product work as specified.
A salesperson is given their goals by management, and they are compensated on achieving that goal - not necessarily what the customer wants.
Good sales, ethical sales, aren't parasitic. A vast majority of sales in todays markets, especially in enterprise markets, are parasitic. The salespeople are interchangeable. The ones that make the most money are the ones most willing to be parasitic. The sales script is targeted and tailored to the intended audience, which in most large companies, is several degrees of separation from the eventual user of the product. You don't need to know what the end user needs. You need to know what the person in charge of buying wants, and that's ultimately emotional validation, hope, a sense of "innovating", a feeling of victory in pricing negotiations, being respected and treated well, and so forth. You can run them through the wringer with sales engineers and migrations after the contract is signed, and even if the end user and the product engineers recognize that your product is the wrong tool for the job, that won't matter if the buying manager is emotionally satisfied with the transaction. People will bend over backwards to justify what they know is "right."
A salesperson CEO will make more money, but will make the world a shittier place, because they're the cotton candy of management. They'll burn credibility and reputation in exchange for profit, kick the can down the road for someone else to clean up the mess later.
Sure, in a healthy, respectable, ethical, functional company, you'd be right, and the CEO would also be the best salesperson for the product, because they'd know it, and the customers, inside and out, and be able to explain and demonstrate exactly what was necessary and why, and justify all the costs and benefits.
This is a world that has Goodharted the measure of success - profit - and empowered people in the execution of shitty behavior. The market rewards higher profits and punishes "failures," often completely out of sync with quality and merit.
We don't live in a good world - companies that behave like you describe would be wonderful. We live in a thoroughly enshittified world, and a whole lot of people "earning" a whole lot of money are in between you and any meaningful change.
From Apple and Microsoft on down, companies want endless, infinitely increasing returns year over year, and they will do anything that isn't explicitly illegal to get it. They'll also do illegal things if the cost of getting caught is less than the profit earned. Alignment with end user needs, benefit to the consumer - these are far down the list of things meaningful to the systems and people making decisions on how money is spent. The job of a salesperson is to understand that system, and exploit it for the benefit of their company.
As a dev I strive to talk to sales and support for this reason. It's not seldom I can do a small change that drastically improves the user experience for one or more clients, be it existing or potential.
Unless engineers spend time directly with customers, something is broken in the organization to begin with. If salespeople and customers dream up solutions and then hand the task to produce this solution over to engineers, then that business is frankly doomed.
There's no reason to believe an engineer would understand the customer needs more than a salesperson. I know a lot of engineers who would do literally anything to avoid dealing with a real customer. At the companies I've worked for, engineers don't even talk to customers if there isn't a specific, technical issue they need to be there for. Meanwhile, salespeople actually talk to customers, probably more than anyone except support.
The ideal case is having leadership who uses the product, or at least is willing to walk in the shoes of an end-user. Plenty of engineers do not do this either.
I think you have that backwards. Sales people absolutely need to understand what they customer wants and needs, or they won't buy it. Engineers just know what they want to build because it's what they want.
But really, Product Managers are the ones who are in the best position to figure it out. They get input from sales, customer service, and engineering, and produce competitive research, and then prioritize from there.
A good CEO is going to listen to their the PMs.
I assume you are an engineer? I am too, not judging :-).
Everybody tends to think that they are in a better position to know how the product should look like, I think it's a normal bias.
Not that salespeople are better. I hate the direction Sonos chose. Just saying that engineers are not always the best at understanding what customers want and need (if you asked me, I would say that everybody needs Yubikeys, and yet people actively fight to keep their right to reuse the same weak password everywhere :-) ).
This is one of the key competencies of UX professionals, specifically UX researchers.
Just like some engineers want something that's technically impressive more than they want what's good for the user.
This is why programmer-driven open source projects are a paragon of usability and have taken over 90% of the mobile phone, desktop, and app market.
As an engineer, I had no idea about:
- what the utility companies wanted when I was working for a SaaS company that printed and processed bills
- what the field service techs wanted when I was writing software for ruggedized windows ce devices
- what the railroad car owners or repairmen wanted when I was working for a company creating a SaaS (https://public.railinc.com/sites/default/files/documents/CRB...)
- I knew nothing about what the healthcare industry needed in the three SaaS companies I worked for including software for health care workers dealing with special needs kids
- the various “enterprises” mostly in the edtech or state and local government space in consulting.
Yes! This pervasive trend has nerfed so much consumer tech. I simply won't buy any more hardware that relies on proprietary clouds
Nothing Apple is shipping seems to be for me, the user. Rather it’s a grab bag of crap “AI” for Wall Street, ways to make it harder to run software of my choosing, and wholesale trashing of perfectly fine UX to cram in whatever useless feature some PM landed for their promotion.
I could say a few hundred things much worse about the direction of windows 11, which is even more obnoxious than Apple, but then I’d have to relieve the horror of being forced to submit my email address to Microsoft to install the damn OS.
Day by day I feel the devices I’ve spent a huge sum of money on no longer belong to me. I’m getting really fucking tired of it, and something has to give.
Absolutely nothing has changed about mail if you turn off Apple Intelligence and Image Playgrounds is just an app that you don’t have to use.
home screen icon theming hit like an empty bus
(Not a fanboy of either; use both.)
“Pin” the categories you want access to.
Or, some times it's plain simple cartelization, making sure no competitor is better. That seems to be the case with smart TVs for example.
It's good to have a word for the impact it causes, but focusing on that novelty makes it looks like it's a new phenomenon that we don't know the causes or how to fix.
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200318153/get-connected...
(Note: there are "EPMs" but it's a totally different thing.)
I have a 90/10 rule when it comes to new products/features these days: they're 90% benefit to the company and 10% benefit to me.
Well yes, the user.
all it takes to install Windows 11 without an account is to press SHIFT + F10 on the "Connect your internet"-screen and execute this command: OOBE\BYPASSNRO
never in my life have i linked an MS-Account to my personal windows, i always use a local account.
Well, that does not really look very user-friendly, does it? Which probably only underlines the point of the parent.
i see posts on here of people reverse-engineering firmwares, hacking together new things, finding and using exploits etc., not sure why installing a windows seems to be a huge topic, then.
I would be very wary. That instruction sounds like an “unsupported” hack that’s likely to lead to future problems.
It makes total sense for the Windows engineers to have this kind of feature flag.
And i dont think they are going to rip out the code that runs and supports local accounts.
ever installed Linux? takes exponentially more knowledge than this windows-local-only workaround.
i'm sure that management is aware of this feature, as it exists for years now and can be trivially found, it's not like this is hidden somewhere in a vault, you know. Same as MAS.
i'm not even a defender of Windows and only use it at home because i game, but if i see that someone has never installed a windows just because they don't want to give M$ their e-mail address (hope they don't have a github or linkedin account, but, you know...), then i want to give them the hint they need :) i use them same functionality to install windows for my parents etc., as they want to have local-only accounts as well. even without this weird work-around, i would still be the one installing windows. OS installation is not hard, but already too difficult or confusing for lots of endusers.
not sure why you chose to reply in such a snarky tone :(
Step 2: make online login the default option
Step 3: make online login mandatory, leave an escape hatch for technical users
<we are here>
Step 4: remove the escape hatch
At some point they integrated spotify and other similar services, which risked what you talked about, but was fine. There are even third party controller frontends available on linux.
But recently (mid 2024) they delivered an absolute stinker of a new app which routes everything via their cloud, fails to load half the time, barely responds, and looks suspiciously like that grab for control you imagine
But as much as I dislike the "new" app, it doesn't push subscribing to this service, so I'm not sure they absolutely want device customers to become subscribers.
The problem is the fundamental disconnect between what's good for users and what's good for the company. The company wants you to have to pay them money every month and control how you interact with the product, so that they can be a services company with recurring revenue.
The consumer wants a device that they buy once and it just works.