The European Union’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a complex, many-legged beast, but at root, it is a regulation that aims to make it easier for the public to control the technology they use and rely on. One DMA rule forces the powerful “gatekeeper” tech companies to allow third-party app stores...
This smells like sour grapes to me, just like when people say to boycott Starbucks and then in the same breath say their coffee sucks. These companies became behemoths because people find a lot of value in the products and services they offer. Failing to acknowledge that truth just makes you sound out of touch.
I mean you SHOULD boycott starbucks for their business practices. But you can’t say their coffee sucks. They don’t have coffee. They have “diabetic inducing coffee flavored sugarwater”
But it’s not coffee
You can, in fact, go to Starbucks and order an Espresso. Let’s just say that it tastes as if the barrista had never drank one straight.
They have regular coffee at Starbucks.
This is definitely true to some degree, but there imo is also another side to this.
Yes, they there are underlying problems/demands that they solve, but they definitely also create and shape those since psychology sadly works extremely effective. And they really try their hardest to manipulate customers.
Another aspect is that they might have originally created that value and given the users what they wanted, which got them in the position they are in now. Sometimes even operating at a loss to bully competition out of the market. But once they achieved this dominant position enshittification commences. Which wouldn’t be that much of an issue, if they wouldn’t also often prevent competition from growing enough to be able to compete.
Example Google search: The demand for a way to navigate the web is real and google fulfilled it best, which made them huge. Timejump to the present: the demand is still the same, but now google shows you what they want you to see and pay billions to be the default search engine to hinder any competition from gaining any traction.
It’s a timeline. tech companies have become much worse, and people warning about them more vocal, so the lower educated classes who mindlessly use their products have (partially) woken up to the real motives of companies who create “free to use” products, i.e. data mining. In the EU, we have a lot of dummies who we call “remote controlled”, who want to simulate a version of the US lifestyle (huge cars, celebrity adulation, eating like shit, single-issue voting, vapidness). These mainly teenagers but regrettably also low-class adults. Those are also the people who still use social networks because they have nothing else going on and are too lazy to invest their free time in worthwhile activities. So it’s a class issue, the social underbelly of the EU is remote controlled by US culture and corporations almost like the social underbelly of the US is.
Americans found lots of values in Starbucks coffee because Americans have no concept of coffee that’s simultaneously black, not bitter, not acidic, and sweet. It would be wrong to blame Starbucks for that, they’re a symptom, not the cause, but yes their coffee sucks. As it does everywhere else in the US, the country that thought that percolators were a mighty fine idea.
(And yes I know you guys invented the Aeropress. Good thing, good job, good coffee (with proper beans), now also use it).
I don’t know how you think that’s relevant to what I said.
Starbucks can provide value to Americans and their coffee can suck, those two things are not mutually exclusive.