Isn’t that a prerequisite for enshitification? Publicly-traded companies are required (by law, I think) to maximize profits for their shareholders, even if that means utterly ruining their original product (Reddit, Boeing, etc.), yes? What do you think?
I don’t think that it’s a prerequisite but it’s definitely a catalyst.
Another catalyst is one company buying another. I cannot think of one example where the acquired company’s product/services got better after a M and A. OTOH, I can think of many examples of it getting worse. Confirmation bias? Absolutely. But still makes you go “hmm…”
I think there can be an intermediary step where things get a little better before they get much worse. I’m thinking of Youtube, which pre acquisiton, iirc, was getting slow and bad. Google infrastructure made it faster, but then, well…
This is really just the first step of enshitification - first they make things good for users, then introduce advertisers, then claw back all the value for themselves.
Or put another way
I feel like there have been some positive outcomes of mergers and acquisitions but I am having trouble thinking of them. What comes to my mind is Meta acquiring Oculus, Activision merging with Blizzard, and Microsoft acquiring Minecraft. All of those have led to a shitty Russian nesting doll of launchers and DRM.
The positives might be harder to note though. There must have been a couple times where some kind of acquisition has brought a series into the mainstream.
I know a lot of people prefer the classic Fallout games but I do wonder how people would be aware of the series if it weren’t for Bethesda buying the right to Fallout for example.
After being acquired by Google, YouTube got better for years (before getting worse again). Android really improved for a decade or so after getting acquired by Google.
The Next/Apple merger made the merged company way better. Apple probably wouldn’t have survived much longer without Next.
I’d argue the Pixar acquisition was still good for a few decades after, and probably made Disney better.
A good merger tends to be forgotten, where the two different parts work together seamlessly to the point that people forget they used to be separately run.
As someone with industry experience working with VR, I can tell you it’s a mixed bag. I think there’s certainly no way Oculus (and consumer VR in general) takes off the way it did without Facebook’s dollars behind it, and it’s certainly paved the way to the outstanding quality of standalone HMDs that are on offer today. However, it killed the initiative for PCVR hardware with the non-consolation that Meta, Pico, and HTC offer “Link mode” on all their headsets and it’s iffy on good days, which makes B2B PCVR very difficult to facilitate without some serious legwork on lowering latency over the air connections. Would that we could revive the Rift S, that headset was perfect for our needs.
I recently discovered the excellent suite of Affinity Photo, Publisher and Designer. Not open source, but very good and they sell them at a reasonable price with no subscription. Seemed pretty ideal. Then a week or two ago they sent out an email saying they had been bought by Canva. I kind of hate Canva because it functions like one big infuriating ad for their subscription service. They promised Affinity would not change, but I have never known such promises to be kept after an acquisition. It’s pretty disappointing.