I suspect it isn't even really "greed". It is just the slow mold growth of an org chart optimizing comfort for itself instead of value for customers. Generally, startups / founders are the only anti-bodies against this type of behavior.
What a weird time for our industry. On one hand, small teams have never been able to move faster than right now.
On the other, the economy and market conditions are brutal for the little guys. Incumbent behemoths hoovering up value, talent and financing.
Instead of shaking things up as usual when a major paradigm shift hits, AI has mostly been a centralizing, consolidating force. Not that I was expecting it to be otherwise, but it's certainly dismaying to witness.
Or am I being too pessimistic / glorifying the past?
It's easier than ever to make your own furniture. IKEA is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to 3D-print tractor parts. John Deere is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to switch to solar power. The petroleum industry is bigger than ever.
One person reverse-engineered Coca Cola, made an exact taste-alike and published the formula. You can make some at home. Coca Cola is bigger than ever.
The hidden cost to competing in these industries is insane. Its so hard to build a physical product that can compete against a giant like IKEA. You need to make some with less r&d, less automation, less infrastructure and you're going to sell less units and all that needs to be price competitive against something that is made on an production line with a team of experienced engineers and sold to millions at fine margins.
> It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.
In this case: these statements aren't contradictory, they're complementary. It's easy to publish a game on Steam, where the audience are and the money is. It's also easy to publish on itch.io where no money is.
That depends, doesn't it? If I make it, it costs time instead of money. (Costs of tools are amortized over all the things I might make.) If I get it from IKEA, it costs money instead of time.
I think org chart the impact is how the individual person can advance their career while doing good work. If they only get rewarded for new things, service and maintenance suffers.
By lowering cost and not investing profit to the company? Yes, short-term v long-term, but who in this world cares about anything after their next salary?
If you have the choice to sell out or not sell out, the only logical decision is to sell out, because then you'll have lots of money and one presumes the product wasn't emotionally important to you. You can then move on to making your next product.
Couldn't have said it better. Whatever else you want to build in life will be exponentially easier if you sell out first, and many builders have many things they want to build and not just one.
Focus on open protocols, simple formats over complex vendor-specific cruft. Then you can always "fork" away from an enshittified saas.
I bet a small team of the quality of the kind developers who are attracted to hacking on Ghostty could recreate the subset of GitHub functionality they actually need in ~six months. It's just the problem of how to pay for the ongoing care, maintenance and hosting? Maybe another opportunity for Mitchell's particular brand of philanthropic OSS.
DNS is the cause of all problems, but it's also the solution - just like anyone can run Apache or Nginx, so should anyone be able to run a git setup. Then it scales really well, as everyone is doing their own thing on their own domains.
Of course, you lose out on some things like ease of user access and various protections.
You don't need this. git and a local drive. git and a shared drive. git and an https engine (can be a plugin to apache/nginx, not a full github like solution). git and ssh but people use username/password.