Nothing wrong with this. Don't over invest in an idea before it's proven.
> bolt on features no <customer> wants."
This is the enshittification.
But optics aside, this also ignores the problem that many of these businesses were not sustainable and were never sustainable. They are heading downhill, partially because they never had any ground to stand on. If we want to see less of this behavior, we should stop allowing the blitzscale strategy of running a loss to gain marketshare.
This is also why the claim of "greed" or "enshitification" falls on deaf ears for them. They could easily say: "No, we lit billions on fire as an investment to keep it free and grow market share; we're now asking for some returns on that investment. We're not adding a Pro plan, we were paying for the Pro plan previously. Be thankful for how long it lasted, and how much money you saved."
I think many of the worst offenders, and so much of the problem, would go away if we combined a payment with a mandatory ad-free experience, for any bundled software. Buy a TV, no ads allowed on the TV itself. Buy a computer, no ads allowed on Windows itself. Buy a Mac, no ads allowed in Apple News, should it be bundled. If it's truly free software that the customer did not directly or indirectly pay for, then ads are permitted; but the moment there's a payment, it's over. You can have Free with Ads, you can have Paid with No Ads, but never both.
That would not stop Discord from getting worse, or other services like them; but not allowing a paid + ad combo would solve most of the painful problems.
This is a form of price dumping and it should be illegal. Actually I'm confused as to why this isn't considered to be illegal already becuase I thought we had laws against this.
These Ivy League MBAs have been getting taught how much money companies have been leaving on the table and they are infecting every industry.
