this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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I think the problem with big companies like Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, etc is that once all the smart & creative people have gone, all you have left are the "line must always go up" business idiots, who have no idea what their company does or how to fix it.
CoPilot is exactly the kind of End-stage, "let's screw our customers to death" idea the CEOs come up with right before their company implodes.
The reason I know that's true is because when this stupid idea for CoPilot came up, there were no smart people who immediately said, "do you have any idea what a terrible f*cking plan this is?"
This is something that steve jobs talked about in an interview that I cannot find at the moment. Its ironic coming from him, but he was talking about when a company truly begins to die. His theory was that when a company is founded, the people that made and designed the product/service are in positions of power. But as a company grows and lives on they get replaced with marketing people. They dont know how to make anything, but they do have that "line go up" mentality. Instead of making something better, the marketing and sales people find ways to sell worse things. Again, hilarious coming from him but i think he had a point.
I don't know if it's really about a breakdown between 'innovators' and 'sales/marketing', but instead a breakdown between people who sincerely want to deliver something intrinsically valuable versus product delivery being some unfortunate obnoxious means to the end of "more money now". A company founded from the onset of "don't care, just make money" will generally fail, and the ones that succeed are the ones that care. Then you move beyond the "founder" generation of a company and then you get to watch the effort get scavenged to pieces.
Whatever may be said of Jobs, he really liked the company and products he was in charge of. Sometimes he would value form over function more than I would like, but it was still at least a facet of the actual product rather than hyper fixation on how to make the profit margins grow without much regard for the product itself. Yes, massive wealth flowed in as they caught the culture just right with iPod and then iPhone, but I don't think it ever descended to cannibalizing the company to make those numbers even better than they were.