Someday, a large corporation is going to finally figure out that firing the people who make their products work results in shitty products no one buys.

The problem is, this isn’t true. The first part certainly is, though many companies are perfectly capable of making shitty products no matter how many employees they have.

The second part though? I would certainly like to believe that, but it’s simply not what happens, especially when it comes to apps and services like Spotify. A huge part of why so much in the tech industry is just absolute ass now is because users are unwilling to try alternatives. Vendor lock in tactics have succeeded, but the average consumer is just lazy and complacent too.

The user experience of Spotify has been dropping dramatically for years. They haven’t lost any users. They have boiled one of the most well cooked frogs in the entire tech industry. And even if you they have a significant portion of users who do actively complain about it, they probably can’t even name an alternative streaming service besides maybe Apple music, and there’s certainly not tech literate enough to understand that you can transfer your library and playlists to another streaming service really easily.

I’ve legitimately explained this to multiple people I know personally who are incredibly frustrated with spotify, and all of them reacted the same way: at the slightest suggestion of putting in a little bit of effort to move away from the platform that they despise, their resolved disappears.

And it’s exactly that mentality, widespread, across so many industries, that allows CEOs to get away with shit like this. They are never punished when consumers are so unwilling to change their habits.