it's rare but that's why apple under jobs, Tesla/SpaceX under musk, stripe under Patrik (and Collison), Shopify under Tobi, Basecamp under DHH, CF under Matthew, NV under Jensen are so successful.

And then on the opposite side we have companies like VW, Microsoft and other craps who are constantly going downhill because there's no person behind the products.

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skydhash 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> we have companies like VW, Microsoft and other craps who are constantly going downhill because there's no person behind the products.

I wouldn't mind if they accepted they are building utilities so that there's no need to reinvent the wheels every quarter. Windows 7 was pretty much done. Just add small amount of features (like wsl) over time, but they had to butcher it to add metro. It's like reinventing pry bars and concrete blocks.

	▲	CrimsonRain 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		TheOtherHobbes answered perfectly. The reason this happens because there is no person behind the product. Bunch of people comes in, they all want to pad their resume, redos the things that are working just because, delivers some shit, collects their bonus and moves on. You need passion and you need to stick around for years for a product to continuously evolve towards greatness.
	▲	TheOtherHobbes 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The two forces driving this are personal competition + ambition and external market subservience. Working software gets remade because 'delivering' a project, which includes both development and marketing, looks good on resumes, not because the users want it. If there are quarterly reports there has to be Number Go Up growth. The net result is enshitification, with income models that rely on exploitation and forced lock-ins, not on voluntary mindshare attracted through quality. UX-first software that isn't the result of corporate infighting, and isn't automatically aligned with corporate values, still exists in niche boutique developer spaces, but not so much elsewhere. The biggest issue is that AI changes none of this from the top end, but may change it from the bottom up. If vibe coding becomes more popular bought/subscription options will first be replaced by DIY vibe coded custom tools with some longevity, and eventually by compute soup which improvises tools on request.
	▲	mschuster91 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Unfortunately, "building utilities" is something the stonk markets really do not like. Pension funds and insurances? Sure, they love stable stock that predictably pays dividends and doesn't move around much. They have giant amounts of money they need to keep safe and utilities have a captive client base with low risks, while also having a predictable expenses schedule, and price increases of suppliers can trivially be passed downstream to the consumers. That's true for classic utilities - power, gas, phone, internet - and for "software utilities", stuff like SAP or, at least in the past, IBM. But the general stock markets? They have been driven rabid by unicorns making return rates that are completely unreasonable. Everyone is just chasing the next hype. One day it's crypto, one day it's NFTs, one day it's cloud computing, next day it's AI. And Microsoft decided during the cloud computing heydays to finally enter that fray... and that was when shit went down hard.