The company offers a useful service, often for free or at a reasonable price.
Once it’s gained enough users, the company cuts corners to save costs, and abuses the users to sell their information, attention, work, and / or time to business customers, like advertisers, and might start charging for the once free service, or increase costs. This significantly degrades the quality, usefulness, and usability of the service, but by this point the users probably have no alternative, or most other alternatives are doing the same.
Once it’s gained enough business customers and cornered the market, it starts cutting corners, degrading the service, and increasing costs for these customers, who, again, by this point have no viable alternative.
Once the degradation and cost increase have reached the level beyond which even the captive users and customers would start leaving in significant numbers, the corporation extracts as much money as possible from its investors and stockholders, for instance “investing” in datacentres that won’t ever be built while distracting them with shiny but useless “innovations” like AI.
The CEO runs away with the money, possibly including a bailout, and the company dies, leaving the investors and stockholders with the debt, the users without a service, the customers without a product, and society poorer than before point 1.
Google is currently at stage 4, having abused both users and customers to the point that many are leaving, and burning money as fast as possible to enrich the top brass and try to look like a company worth investing in.
It won’t be long before it implodes, but it’ll still be too long.
That’s true, but only juuuuust enough to keep the advertisers paying. There is no incentive for a monopoly like Google to provide better service for their customers (their customers are the advertisers) than the bare minimum, since they have no meaningful competition.
They really know how to please their customers (the advertisers).
Actually, the advertisers lose too, this is just a way to get people to search more than once so advertisers dollars don’t go as far.
Doubt it, the AI will direct people directly to the advertisers.
There are multiple stages of enshittification:
Google is currently at stage 4, having abused both users and customers to the point that many are leaving, and burning money as fast as possible to enrich the top brass and try to look like a company worth investing in.
It won’t be long before it implodes, but it’ll still be too long.
That’s true, but only juuuuust enough to keep the advertisers paying. There is no incentive for a monopoly like Google to provide better service for their customers (their customers are the advertisers) than the bare minimum, since they have no meaningful competition.