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[return to "Brother have gotten to where they are now by not innovating"]
1. aljgz+u4[view] [source] 2023-11-27 08:23:53
>>anothe+(OP)
The growth mindset is incredible for expanding when your product is in its early ages. But there should be a "sustain" mindset at some point. First you push to grow the market, or your market share. When returns on your efforts become diminishing, you push to improve how much you earn of each customer/each sale. At some point there should be a mindset that our company is worth X dollars, and we should sustain that.

What happens instead is companies keep rewarding executives by increases in revenue, they keep rewarding product managers similarly, and product managers selectively choose metrics that optimize immediate revenue, at the expense of brand loyalty. This is happening to almost every tech company, and the exceptions are rare gems.

In android, if I click on a link in facebook messenger that takes me to facebook, the back button takes me "back" to facebook's home screen instead of to the messenger app. Tapping back button again does nothing. I have to switch back to messenger manually. That's 5-6 taps/swipes instead of 1, because a product manager's bonus in FB depends on how well they beg for more engagement. As a result, I rarely use any of these products. I used to spend some time in Instagram/FB. I close LinkedIn immediately after an important interaction for similar reasons.

I made a mistake of buying another Samsung product after years. Never again. I made a mistake of buying another HP product, never again. I might still consider Dell only because of how well they supported me with their monitor flicker.

None of these products have a defect that's caused by poor design, programming, or manufacturing. They all suffer from growth-obsessed mindset.

Brother is what it is, not because of lack of innovation, but because of deliberate evasion of short-sighted greed.

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2. jbreck+mb[view] [source] 2023-11-27 09:10:54
>>aljgz+u4
If you think about it the growth mindset is quite psychotic.

Imagine a human being with a growth mindset. He optimises his bodyfat to the point of anorexia. He optimises conversations by extracting knowledge then moving on. His diet is pure protein shakes and broccoli. Every morning he does six Leetcode Hards. If you met him you'd think he was deranged.

This growth ideology means every company we interact with behaves like Bob. Soon enough this Bobism filters into people through the labour market and professional values. (Like the Leetcoders). It's alienating and the only purpose it serves is an investment based economy with unclear benefits to society at large

It creates a very strange world where we have computers acting like people and people acting like machines

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3. Applej+1S[view] [source] 2023-11-27 14:33:37
>>jbreck+mb
Depends on how you define society. Is society a machine for producing high achievers who accomplish tasks? Is society a blade for lopping off tall poppies? Is society an organism with its own fitness functions outside of the individuals that compose it?

If you've studied artificial life and see societies as mechanisms for executing the genetic algorithm, you see the faults with the growth ideology you've criticized. It's a plateau-making machine: it will tend to reward what's working right now, and starve out the genetic pool of anything else, leaving the resultant society unable to adapt.

Computers acting like people and people acting like machines is a bad trade-off. It's not at all focussing on the strengths of each. There's a reason societies (such as big cities) that seemingly focus over-much on caring for useless and suboptimal people (compared to the darwinism of the wild frontier), end up burgeoning and becoming hotbeds of accomplishment. If you treat people not as machines, but as the genes of the genetic algorithm, it suddenly makes a lot more sense to be humanist: you'll get unexpected wins out of unexpected traits being cultivated until they can be useful in their own right.

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