Never Forgive Them ⇥ wheresyoured.at
The tools we use in our daily lives outside of our devices have mostly stayed the same. While buttons on our cars might have moved around — and I’m not even getting into Tesla’s designs right now — we generally have a brake, an accelerator, a wheel, and a turn signal. Boarding an airplane has worked mostly the same way since I started flying, other than moving from physical tickets to digital ones. We’re not expected to work out “the new way to use a toilet” every few months because somebody decided we were finishing too quickly.
Yet our apps and the platforms we use every day operate by a totally different moral and intellectual compass. While the idea of an update is fairly noble (and not always negative) — that something you’ve bought can be maintained and improved over time is a good thing — many tech platforms see it as a means to further extract and exploit, to push users into doing things that either keep them on the app longer or take more-profitable actions.
A barn-burner of an essay, and a perfect way to summarize this year — this decade, just about — in technology. One may quibble with individual examples — I, for one, cannot remotely co-sign “[t]he destruction of Google Search […] should be written about like a war crime” — but the industry-wide trend leads directly to Zitron’s deserved and palpable frustration.
With my limited understanding of economics terms, I think of this in the context of reducing consumer surplus. A straightforward example is to increase prices — smartphone makers, for example, recognized years ago they were leaving money on the table and would have no problem selling phones for well over a thousand dollars.
Some of these software companies have figured out they are also charging less than they could. Microsoft Office used to cost $200 in the United States for an indefinite license. It is now $70 per year which means, after three years, users are paying more than the previous one-time fee. Adobe’s Creative Suite used to cost a whopping $2,600; the current pricing for Creative Cloud is $660 per year. But after four years, Creative Cloud costs more. There are advantages to subscription pricing, like ongoing updates; there are also disadvantages, like being required to pay indefinitely to continue using their features. Depending on how often one upgrades, they might find subscription pricing less expensive in the long run, but the choice is no longer theirs.
Remarkably, the consumer surplus is not closed solely through increased dollar amounts. There are, as Zitron ably documents, plenty of non-financial costs, too. I expect this to some extent in free-to-use products, but it infects everything. I am, in the long term, paying more to be annoyed more often — to the huge benefit of these corporations.