Wouldn't it be nice if some companies instead of ramping up ads for revenue passed along the value to consumers? Once they made their money back on the original investments convert to a lifestyle and provide a valuable product without squeezing every penny our of it and in the end killing it. One day maybe.
The problem is who wants to be CEO of that? How many people do you know are simultaneously voracious enough to want to be the CEO of something and also totally chill and down to just have a lifestyle business? How many people do you know would take a salary of $5 million/year and just keep working the same job? Pretty sure almost everyone I know would do that for maybe two years and then quit and retire. Companies doesn't want that. So that leaves us with the kind of people that would take that salary and keep at it. The reason CEOs are different kinds of people from the rest of us is that it stopped being about the money for them a long time ago. It's not not about the money, but after getting enough money for your own lifetime and several other people's, why keep working? Not everyone is cut out for it. Be the change you want to see in the world. Claw your way up to the c-suite and then run the company how you see fit. Just don't let that climb change you so that you no longer want to run it as a lifestyle business.
They did pass on a lot of value to consumers. They used their profits to grow, build Gmail, buy and grow YouTube, build Android.
Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.
Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.
I feel like you'd need a new corporate structure or something, like the way an S-corp is different, but on steroids.
Because I agree, the forced obsession with "growth" at all costs, which seems necessary to operate a public company (at least in this century[1]), is imho the #1 reason why enshittification is unavoidable.
[1] I'd describe nearly all present-day corporations as fixated on quarterly results even at the expense of business viability. Something I truly don't understand is why big companies say, 75 years ago seem to have been so much less that way. If anyone has any theories I'd love to hear them.
People overwhelmingly prefer ad-supported to subscription supported. Google would be a dramatically better service if everyone who used it paid. I really, really, cannot overstate that.
The internet sucks because users feel entitled to everything on it for free. They don't want ads and they don't want to pay subscriptions. uBlock origin, archive.is, and constant complaining about how the content sucks.
The internet is full of children with a naive understanding of how things work. The are so deluded that they even call on companies to simply provide them everything for free if they want to be "successful".
Google has almost $100 billion in cash reserves right now. Big tech together has over $1 trillion in cash - that's in the ballpark of the GDP of the top 20 countries.
The notion that Internet sucks because megacorps have to scrounge for cash doesn't pass the most basic smell test.
