You have to sell a new phone every 12-18 months, because otherwise the shareholders eat you alive for not chasing infinite profits. You have to differentiate your new phone from your last phone, even if there are no meaningful changes to be made and the last phone was good enough for everything anyone would ever use it for (as was the one before it, and the one before that, and etc etc). You have to push for people to buy the new phone, because otherwise you don’t make money.
So you tell the engineers to bump up the clock speeds on the processor 5-10% so you can market it as being faster. You market the phone as being revolutionary for using the USB connector that was forced on you by regulators because your proprietary one was filling landfills with e-waste and pretend like it was your brilliant idea all along. You make sure to limit that USB connector to speeds that were outdated 10 years ago purely so you have a built-in ‘upgrade’ for your next phone where you fix the thing that shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with.
And then you realize your phone overheats because you overclocked the processor, all to squeeze extra performance out of a chip that 99.9999999999% of users will never notice or need. You’ve made the user experience of your phone worse purely so you could pursue an untenable goal of endless profit, a pattern you will repeat every 12-18 months for the rest of eternity or until the climate wars claim your life.
Only the most sane and functional economic system.
because otherwise the shareholders eat you alive for not chasing infinite profits.
I think that while the threat is real, the threat being a major motivator for upper management is largely illusory. It’s absolutely there, but it’s not making them do stuff they’re not already keen on doing. Nobody weasels their way up the ladder to do non-profit-maximizing things, occasionally getting reprimanded for not maximizing profit and always one stray “the old phone’s fine” tweet away from getting canned. They’re willing and enthusiastic profit-maximizers.
You have to sell a new phone every 12-18 months, because otherwise the shareholders eat you alive for not chasing infinite profits. You have to differentiate your new phone from your last phone, even if there are no meaningful changes to be made and the last phone was good enough for everything anyone would ever use it for (as was the one before it, and the one before that, and etc etc). You have to push for people to buy the new phone, because otherwise you don’t make money.
So you tell the engineers to bump up the clock speeds on the processor 5-10% so you can market it as being faster. You market the phone as being revolutionary for using the USB connector that was forced on you by regulators because your proprietary one was filling landfills with e-waste and pretend like it was your brilliant idea all along. You make sure to limit that USB connector to speeds that were outdated 10 years ago purely so you have a built-in ‘upgrade’ for your next phone where you fix the thing that shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with.
And then you realize your phone overheats because you overclocked the processor, all to squeeze extra performance out of a chip that 99.9999999999% of users will never notice or need. You’ve made the user experience of your phone worse purely so you could pursue an untenable goal of endless profit, a pattern you will repeat every 12-18 months for the rest of eternity or until the climate wars claim your life.
Only the most sane and functional economic system.
I think that while the threat is real, the threat being a major motivator for upper management is largely illusory. It’s absolutely there, but it’s not making them do stuff they’re not already keen on doing. Nobody weasels their way up the ladder to do non-profit-maximizing things, occasionally getting reprimanded for not maximizing profit and always one stray “the old phone’s fine” tweet away from getting canned. They’re willing and enthusiastic profit-maximizers.