The pace of change in the tech world

TidBITS Talk
41

Another disadvantage went unmentioned: in that environment your printshop friend had a very real incentive to be diligent about her work and strive for perfection.

If she screwed up just a tiny detail, three days would be lost and all her work (as well as the work of the type company, at cost to her) was thrown away as she restarted her task. If she OTOH was meticulous about what she did and the quality of her own work, not only would she get her customers results a whole lot faster than her competition, she’d also be making a lot more money per hour.

That was an environment that rewarded companies and people who take their work serious and show dedication and resolve. Next time you deal with a call center trying to resolve some stupid paperwork issue that all started because some distracted bozo was sloppy when jotting down a detail, think about this. Where are such incentives these days? And who’s willing to pay for that level of care to detail when the alternative is “good enough” because although it’s sloppy as heck, it costs an order of magnitude less? Me personally, I’d prefer to pay more but get good quality. Only problem is, in so many consumer markets there appears to be just the race to the bottom so in those markets that choice is becoming more and more rare.

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42

My view is that, for better or worse, most consumers now select low price over just about everything else, such as service, convenience, or quality. I think there are many reasons for this…but I believe greater access to value priced goods and services has been a net positive over the last three or four decades. Leisure travel used to be inaccessible for a lot of people and trading a stock cost a retail investor almost a hundred dollars in fees, for example.

Plus, I believe there will always be companies willing to serve people who want high end products or elite service levels. For me, it’s the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” that truly requires innovation and disruption, not adding Rose Gold as a gadget color or using vicuña on the hood of a puffer jacket.

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I wasn’t talking about luxury and posers. It’s easy to make something expensive, completely irrespective of actual quality. And there’s wanting to show you can afford a certain product (rose gold iPhones or LV labeled bags). I wasn’t talking about such vanity.

I was talking about getting grass fed beef from free range cows slaughtered by a butcher who knows the farm and the farmer that meat was raised by. A butcher who knows how I like my cuts and doesn’t forget to set aside that thing I casually mentioned to him last week. Safeway can easily label a ribeye $70 and claim it’s awesome. Yet they will still never match what that butcher and his product does for me. My concern is that in the world today as I see it, Safeway is winning and that butcher is losing. People like me who prefer that butcher to cheap/convenient/generic über alles are apparently a dwindling minority. And I have a suspicion that’s because we have allowed the wrong incentives to creep in. @xdev’s printshop friend had the right incentives. I’d like those back. :wink:

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I was a professional graphic designer for many years before the invention of computerized desktop publishing. In the old days, graphic designers were typography experts because they had to be. It was (and still is today) an important part of the job. Ordering type proofs from professional typesetting houses was expensive, so it was important to get things right. The desktop publishing revolution had a number of major consequences. Most importantly, anyone with a Mac Plus could be a “graphic designer”, whether they knew what they were doing or not. Over time, this has had a devastating effect on the quality of “professional” typography in general. Every innovation is a two-edged sword.

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45

It has been clear to me for some time that when increasing profits becomes the most important consideration in all commercial enterprises, excellence and integrity inevitably decline. It seems to me that what we are seeing today is the result of an advanced state of this continuing decline.

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To @xdev’s point with the first book I ever produced, the designer got on the phone after the overall approach to design was approved and rang the typesetter.

“John, Tommy will fax over the essay, can you set that in Garamond, 10 over 13, a four inch column, and not too tight, you know the way I like it”.

The typesetter reviewed my fax and said “The author has made a few errors, I’ve corrected them.” Some of these were very minor, some were alterations in sentence structure to ‘clarify his intended meaning’.

I was alarmed and rang the author, renowned within the art world, he said “oh, it’s John, whatever he suggests is fine by me.”

The typesetter had a PhD in Literature, and everyone used him in part to rely on his attention to detail and grasp of the bigger picture. That and he could easily recall various designers overall tastes regarding kerning. There’s still no menu item in InDesign replicating John.

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47

And to @Simon’s point my daughter always posits that there’s no more important social decision than where you put your money.

We shop local too, our county has a large amount of small organic farms, some of whose families we have come to know at our local market. Similarly our local big town has a number of small food shops, delicatessens, providers. Between them all we can minimise our supermarket shopping.

I made a short documentary about local farmers a good while ago. One farmer, from Poland originally and who trained in agriculture in the soviet system, said he was told by his tutor “Organic apple means worms in your apple.” He remembered thinking ‘but that’s good if the worm likes it’. He still said the challenge of organic farming was the issue of scale, that small scale did not meet the overall needs of the population. We are somewhat down that road but a ways to go.

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48

I don’t know that this is true. I think technology has actually brought about a resurgence of small, high-quality providers by making it easier to communicate with potential customers and receive payment. In the past, you’d have had to decide you wanted the high-quality beef, then look around or call around to find a butcher to work with. Now it’s easier to find the local provider and pay–and technology has even allowed the providers to work with delivery services to decrease the time and effort required to be a customer. (My associated observation is that farmers’ markets are now much bigger and have more varied options than they did 20+ years ago, for similar reasons.)

Dave

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49

It’s not just the number of updates but I find “small print” items to end up being what appear to be major changes to how my apps operate. Of course I’ve been at it since 1984 and am now more grouchy.

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Agreed. Especially in the last ten years or so, the number of small specialty places has really rebounded. I think of local bookstores, which had all but disappeared in the ravening maws of Borders / Barnes & Noble, etc. The latter have been eaten by a larger Amazonian predator, but the space for local personal places has reappeared. I’ve seen 2-3 nice local book shops open in my area just in the last few years and they’re doing well (and a butcher, now that you mention it).

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This is true of almost every specialty/boutique business regardless of the product or service. Scaling up such “retro” businesses isn’t practical; and even if it was, relatively few ordinary consumers are willing to pay extra for high-quality goods. It’s great that home-made jam is available at the local farmers market; but supermarket shelves will continue to be stocked with the same old crap. I think the notion that the general standard of quality can be rescued from its current decline is just a pipe dream because profit rules. If Steve Jobs tried to start Apple Computer today, he’d be laughed out of business.

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In my view, I’d say relatively few “ordinary consumers” are able to pay extra for “high-quality goods”. Even middling quality goods and services are out of the financial reach of a lot of people. Further, I think it is simplistic to attribute this situation to any single factor, such as companies’ profit goals or government policies.

I also think the brand positioning and consumer experience of a product, service, or store are not experienced in the same way by every single person. What feels attractive and comforting to some (say, the minimalistic and design-forward atmosphere of an Apple Store) can feel intimidating or condescending to others.

So, I believe that there isn’t a simple path or policy to raising average quality levels for entire populations. Some people face income constraints, some people’s tastes favor non-bespoke offerings, and some people simply don’t care. But as I said earlier, there will always be ways for people who have the means or the desire to pursue the best of the best to get what they want. That’s why I don’t wring my hands over the existence of low quality goods or mass market retailers.

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I would say that the percentage of “ordinary consumers” who can afford to pay extra for high-quality goods is dropping fast. Even putting food on the table is a real challenge for more and more working class people; but I do not agree that the profit motive is not fundamentally to blame. It is the profit motive that sends jobs overseas, shrinks the American middle class, etc. Or let’s call it by its real name—good old-fashioned greed. One could say that the the “American way” now boils down to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. But this is much too big a subject for this forum, imho.

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“I’ve seen 2-3 nice local book shops open in my area just in the last few years”

If one can’t get to a local bookstore for whatever reason, there’s

https://bookshop.org/

which distributes the profits to independent bookstores. You choose a store, and anything you buy supports that store. World wide not just US. I don’t know how many stores belong, but several near me do. The store likely makes more money if you go in person, though not everyone’s budget (or house stability) can survive actually walking into a bookstore…

Unfortunately, I don’t buy dead tree books anymore because I can’t read them–I need ebooks. I haven’t found any way to buy ebooks from local bookstores. Once upon a time I could buy adobe drmed ebooks from Powells (not local to me, but a great bookstore) but they had to stop doing that when adobe jacked up the licensing fees IIRC.

For things I can’t get from a library, I occasionally buy direct from some publishers, rarely from books-a-million, or do without. I’d love to find an alternative local store friendly alternative.

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“In the past, you’d have had to decide you wanted the high-quality beef, then look around or call around to find a butcher to work with.”

Not if you go back a bit farther. In my youth, almost all grocery stores had real butchers in the meat department, and it was easy to work with them. The biggest chains such as Kroger were terrible and a preview of our present, but there were lots of alternatives from smaller chains, to tiny local chains to single stores. Some stores specialized more than others if you wanted e.g. aged beef but they’d all slice your steaks to a requested thickness or special order almost anything. Same with the bakery and produce departments. But as the chains ate each other they stopped hiring butchers and bakers, and hired people who could cheaply put factory prepared glop out in trays and stacks, and shove pre-made all-purpose dough into an oven.

Technology also homogenized the food itself, as they bred out flavor to increase shelf life, ease of transport, lower fat content in meat. Factory scale increases health problems, not just for the eventual customers, but for the livestock and produce itself. For factory scale, you have to standardize as much as possible, which reduces genetic variability, which means that many crops and livestock breeds are one pest away from from a world-wide population crash. Nine million US dairy cattle, ~2/3 of the dairy population, can be traced back to only two bulls, and effectively the ‘herd’ is 50 individuals. That heard is now catching and spreading bird flu… Also, enjoy chocolate while you can.

It’s easy for rich people (most people on this list are rich compared to the average) to find boutique stores and farmer’s markets to get better quality. But nothing, not even fresh water, scales to everyone at the current human population.

Artificial parroting aka generative AI is following the same homogenization trajectory, but faster and with potentially worse and sooner consequences (quite a lot like making pink slime from thousands of cattle, aint it?)

Rob Dunn, “Never Out of Season” (get it from your local bookstore!)

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Everything you are saying is true, and all of it can be traced back to the desire for higher profits at any cost. As a society, we have allowed big business to abandon its responsibility to add value to our lives in exchange for our patronage.

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“Everything you are saying is true, and all of it can be traced back to the desire for higher profits at any cost.”

A lot of it is that, but a lot is that the additional efficiency is needed to feed so many more people. World population has tripled since I was a kid. Small family farms cannot feed modern cities full of many millions of people even if you destroy all wild places to do it. Same with clothes–natural fibers have many environmental advantages over synthetics, but you cannot grow enough, especially if you want food too. But you can make enough cheap synthetic textiles for everyone. Even the craving of the middle class (what little’s left of it) for ‘sustainable’ cashmere is destroying huge ares of Spanish land due to over grazing by the huge flocks.

With computers/communications, much of the churn is greed, but many of the advances, especially in device power efficiency and lower material costs, have made it possible for the tech to become available for most people on the planet, which opens up important possibilities for education and more.

“As a society, we have allowed big business to abandon its responsibility to add value to our lives in exchange for our patronage.”

But that’s not a new thing. Businesses have rarely been responsible to anything other than profits unless forced to be. US regulatory agencies for the FDA to OSHA and similar in other countries were formed to try to rein in the traditional horrendous abuses of workers and customers. That was fairly successful for a few decades, until too many people took it for granted. There’s a good history book, “The Good Old Days–They Were Terrible!” by Otto Bettmann (yes, that Otto Bettman). It’s fairly recent history, but older history in most parts of the world isn’t an improvement until you get way back to pre-agricultural, pre-business societies.

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Thank you for your thoughts. You’re saying that over-population is also a big factor, and you are correct. Regardless of who’s to blame, the obvious question is: what can be done about our human predicament? This is where governments simply must act because there aren’t enough visionaries and philanthropists in the world to save our way of life without government intervention. What a world!

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“what can be done about our human predicament?”

It’s been demonstrated in diverse cultures that if you give women access to good education and good health care, the birth rate goes down quickly. That might be enough–if the world could stay sane long enough for it to do the work. But that doesn’t seem all that likely for a bunch of reasons including social media and billionaires doing their best to sow confusion around the world.

There are a bunch of people and governments who moan that there aren’t enough young people to take care of all the old people, oh woe is us, quick, raise the birth rate! Never mind that our economy is a structural disaster in the first place and that it could and should be changed to something that doesn’t require physically impossible constant growth. If they think old people are expensive, they should pay some attention to how expensive kids are. There was a good article in the Guardian a few days ago:

“This is where governments simply must act”

But we have to do what we can to form a government that gives a damn. Most important of all in the short term where and when allowed: VOTE. Vote for people at all levels of government who understand why regulation works, who recognize that there are a slew of serious problems to be solved or at least seriously worked on, and who want to keep society from going down the tubes. Get your friends and family to the polls. Help young people register then get them out the door when it’s time to get their ballots in. Failing to vote for sanity is two votes for chaos.

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Supermarkets are incredibly low margin businesses, usually in the 1-3% range. Nobody’s making massive profits there. The drive for homogenization in food came out of the need to feed more and more people at great distances and consistently. One of the incredible successes of 20th century food production has been the substantial global reduction in starvation and malnourishment. We’ve gone from a global society regularly operating in food deficit to one largely operating in food surplus.* That comes with associated consequences (obesity, the health effects of ultra-processed food) but turning back the clock means essentially having to choose which 3 billion people you want to get rid of, globally. The previous model simply cannot sustain the current level of population.**

*Not everyone and everywhere of course, but much more broadly.
** A reduced population would certainly have all sorts of benefits (lower environmental impact, etc) but getting there is difficult (for one thing in the US it means a giant overhang of retirees supported by many fewer workers as the population shrinks).