When A Man Gets Too Big
Updated: Feb 16
Sept 19, 2019
He is now capable of collapsing under his own weight.
He focuses more on selling than he does on innovating, which is what made him successful in the first place. He gets fancy. The fancier he gets, the more bells and whistles get added to his product, but the market wants only the chicken, not its feathers. He drains time, money, and resources developing and selling feathers.
Look at what happened to Microsoft Windows. Win98 was my favorite. It was fast and functional. It had just enough GUI to make it user-friendly. When I was moved to WinXp, I felt like it was slower but fancier. Win 7 was probably the last usable system. Now, Linux is on the rise primarily because Windows has become a bloatware. I would have never looked for an alternative if I had always used Win98. Everything worked on 64Mb of ram. It is crazy for me to think that the world has made all these upgrades just to accommodate bloatware. We have purchased new hardware just to accommodate marketers. The things that an average user does such as sending emails, word processing, and surfing the internet were possible before too.
Look at android. I looked at my brother’s old Galaxy Y. Somehow it is quicker than the bloatware we have now.
Look at Facebook. It used to be lean and functional. Now, it is a dystopian adware.
Look at NFS games. I think NFS Shift 2 (2012) was the last good NFS. The fandom thinks it was NFS Most Wanted (2005). What happened? EA primarily improved on graphics, which should be the icing on the top, not the cake itself.
Look at the internet as a whole. It used to be fun to browse the internet. People used to go surfing. Now, every website celebrates Christmas year round. You are greeted with so many banners, embedded links, and pop-ups that you close the website before you scroll down to the content you were looking for.
When a new product enters the market, it just needs to be user-friendly enough for it to work. Beyond that, all bells and whistles only annoy the user.
This is why I do not think that antitrust laws matter. When a company gets big, it makes a big dumb product, deviating itself from the central value it once brought to the customers. That is the process of its natural demise. No law is needed.
This principle of natural demise applies to everything: human beings, nations, constitutions, firms, and cultures. As soon as they get cocky, they walk towards their demise.