Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned. I am very unsurprised by this outcome. People wonder why good software becomes bad, and it’s because the people who were good at engineering are often outmaneuvered by corporate-politics savvy people in a growing company. One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of peopl…
Sometimes I wonder what the tech ecosystem would look like without the ZIRP era. I look back over 15 years and with the exception of increased smart phone usage, everything else still looks mostly familiar. Maybe a bit more slick, but also slower and buggier despite having much better hardware. There hasn't been a qualitative leap in software (as was in the 90s). Just larger SaaS companies. Without ZIRP would it have…
An example is messaging apps. Today, if I want to remain in touch with my friends and family I have to juggle between Facebook messenger (thank the heavens for this app which means I rarely need to open Facebook itself), Whatsapp, Signal, etc.
In the early 2000s, even though I was on more services, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AIM, a single app such as trillian or Adium was enough to communicate on all of them.
While today we have to go to a whole slew of walled gardens to read posts from folks, such as substack, medium, twitter, etc. earlier, the heavy use of RSS meant that a single RSS news client covered everything.
From a socio-political standpoint, “canceling” also wasn’t a thing, since you could trivially self host a blog and discovery would be no different.
Even better, discovery was through human recommendations rather than algorithms designed to keep you hooked on the platform.