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!!

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?

Uber is a frigging service for calling a taxi, how much "R&D" does a mobile app connected to a database need?