Google Chrome and "Enhanced Ad Privacy".

Zoom: "wE cAnT cOlAbOrAtE iF wErE nOt In PeRsOn. We NeEd EmPloYeEs To ReTuRn tO tHe OfFiCe."

They have stiff competition but this has to be one of the most incompetent boners I have ever seen pulled by a major corporation. Stating very clearly to the entire world that you have no confidence in your own product. If Eric Yuan (Zoom's CEO) wasn't the principle shareholder he probably would have been fired out of a cannon by now.

Wizards of the Coast

Decentralize. Democratize. Demonetize. Time for a new internet, a new gaming industry, and a way of sharing thoughts and ideas where clout is the least important factor.

Literally every company is doing this. There was a time when, for example, Apple could reverse engineer the Word document format and make their own word processor that uses them. This was very common and resulted in things like IBM PC clones that sped up innovation.

Now companies use litigation and corporate buyouts to reduce their competition, then set up ways to extract rents on customers rather than providing a service. Business folks love this because it means a consistent stream of revenue that won't go away. And now you've got carmakers looking to charge by the month for features.

For more details, read Chokepoint Capitalism.

Microsoft. They've been itching to go to a fully cloud-dependent subscription-only model for Windows for a while now.

This is a turning point and I'm here for it

~~Twitter, Reddit, Facebook~~ => Fediverse

~~Unity~~ => Godot

~~AAA Studios~~ => Indie devs

Enshittification

What'd Blizzard do?

Twitter Reddit Unity Blizzard Microsoft Epic Google All of the Movie industry. All of the animation industry. All of the Gaming publishers.

Basically, everything, everywhere.

"Why don't you pay for every damn bullet you fire in the game you fucking peasants!!??" -Unity CEO

I hear Discord is due for its enshitification.

Netflix.

Red Hat (Enrerprise Linux) & HashiCorp (Terraform) closed the source of their products in different ways, also fucking over their community of clients and contributors, though their reasoning seems slightly more sane than "no more free money, aaargh!"

Companies can no longer continue to grow through innovating their products or services. Companies are no longer competing in that domain because they have already conquered it completely.

Companies can no longer grow through marketing and branding. Branding is everything and everywhere now, even normal people have personal brands, they have already conquered that domain and most people have grown to disdain marketing and branding so its less effective than ever.

Companies can no longer grow through data collection and advertising. All data is collected, ads are everywhere and they are always listening to everything we say and do. They have already conquered that domain.

Now all that's left is competition through exploitation. It's the only way companies can continue to grow. That is the stage of capitalism we are entering.

Unfortunately and admittedly, we are the problem. These companies know that people pay for convenience and stick to what they know. If we were less likely to do so companies would have to raise their standards. Take Twitter for example, even with Musks over inflated numbers other sources indicate there's still hundreds of millions of Twitter users. They see all of the things Musk has done and it hasn't buried his business thus they are now taking pages out of his book.

Okay wait what the fuck is this picture

Why is this a trend?

Please somehow let YouTube/Google be next. Somehow.

Netflix... except that move is sadly paying off

The year is 2023, every single major companies are racing each other to become Public Enemy No.1 and shoot themselves in the foot in as many ways as they can think of.

Literally every top 500 company

companies want to go back to feudalism

I heard Plex has something going on so people are switching to Jellyfin

Forgot WotC. They sent Pinkertons after a leaker and tried to drain every last dollar out of third party creators with their OGL update.

Companies be like:

i fear mozilla may be in the line here, finally giving-in to google on manifest 3's limitations, web 'drm', and targeted ads program, in exchange for keeping the lights on (google is their single biggest source of funding via payment for being default search).