They would make plenty of money if they went in to maintenance mode and just kept the lights on development-wise instead of pouring billions into R&D each year.
There's probably a big opportunity in the startup world for building businesses that have an end goal. Like a TV show that has a whole story to tell and then stops... a business that has an entire development plan which finishes and at the end you have a stable business that stops adding features, cuts development costs to maintenance, and just exists.
Like I don't need my taxi app to change, we're good, you can just be done making new stuff.
There's even more money to be made selling a false promise of infinite growth, dumping your bags, and riding off into the sunset.
It hurts so much that our system makes that concept as impossible at scale as landing a ship on Venus with 10,000 people and starting a space colony complete with all the amenities of home.
Yours is a pretty normal idea for nearly any business before 100 years ago, plus still the way all small businesses with 1 owner generally work (they call it a “Lifestyle business” today). But any public company that just said “Yeah we basically just print $400 million in profit every year, and have no plans to grow that, nor to change anything besides doing maintenance” gets the kind of treatment Southwest just did: taken over by the enshittification engineers and destroyed. Everything must have infinite growth!!
Uber is a frigging service for calling a taxi, how much "R&D" does a mobile app connected to a database need?
Your local taxi company probably has a white-labelled app - that’s the obvious point of comparison.
For the companies in my areas, their apps feel kinda clunky, but are generally fully-functional, and don’t contain ads like the Uber app.
Brainstorming new fees to add on to their services that the drivers don’t get a cut of takes up a few billion a year I would imagine.
They spent billions and billions on trying to make self-driving a thing.
So they burnt money and have nothing to show for it? Why do we let these companies play around with billions of dollars while we lack universal childcare or medicare for all?
Complete looney toons over here if you think this is at all acceptable. I bet the workers would figure out a better use of the budget than the executives at this rate too.
I think it's going to take a act of Congress to make this happen. We could literally legislate our way out of enshitification but where's the huge amount of money in that?
Some forms of enshitification already feel a lot like dumping to me. I wonder why existing consumer protection laws don’t cover it already in some cases.