Every major technology company: a vignette
"Let's make everything bad on purpose"
"But why? We have the staffing and funding to make things that work well."
"No, everything needs to get a little worse all the time."
"Can we make the UIs better at least?"
"No, they need to get slower. They can change laterally."
"Laterally?"
"Yes, you see the new UI may not be better or worse than the old UI, but because we've changed it for no reason, users will still have a worse experience. If they had only experienced the new UI, they might have a good experience. This is why we need to keep changing the UI so often: we keep getting new users. If we kept the UI static then our population of the newest users might accidentally have a good experience. The moment our newest user get use to the UI, we improve it again, thereby successfully making their experience worse."
"Oh. Well, can the UIs get faster least? Computers have gotten so much fast in the past 15 years.
"That's a stupid question, and I'm not even going to dignify it. The moment a user gets a faster computer we MUST make our software slower to compensate. Ideally, we eat up more performance gains than they just paid for."
"Well ... does the slower software at least do more?
"Heavens no, it does less. The old on-prem version worked great, but our new SaaS product has fewer features for significantly less money."
"I don't get what we're doing here."
"Just use an LLM more often, I'll sure it'll all make sense soon."