Here's a specific example. IMDB (an Amazon company) forces you to watch a movie trailer for a movie you don't want to see in order to watch a movie trailer for a movie you actually want to see.
You have to watch an 2-minute ad in order to unlock the privilege to view the same kind of 2-minute ad.
I'm not sure weather to call that absurdism or dystopian, but it's nuts.
More importantly, it is friction. It actively stops the customer from doing what amazon (or its advertisers) actually want them to do.
This same thoughtlessness to the impacts of decision making has been inexplicably implemented into Amazon's companies at every level. This is a big problem for Amazon customers, especially.
Amazon's insistence on advertising blocks customers from spending money. Every unrelated "sponsored" product in the search results gives that much more opportunity for a buyer to look on a different site. Serving an ad has inexplicably become a higher priority than closing a sale.
Look at Amazon's "are you really sure you actually want to buy that" page they are now using to try and upsell customers before letting them check out. To say the least, it is a fundamental change in philosophy from the company who invented single-click checkout and "Buy it Now".
Microsoft does not put it's good programmers on its consumer-grade products, because Microsoft does not respect it's consumers.
Microsoft puts its real talent on its customer-grade products, like Azure and SaaS. That's where they make real money, so that's where they send real talent. The only exception right now might be copilot, which will never make money... But they say that's where they're putting their best and brightest.
Then again, they're probably spending billions of CPU hours to generate millions of unique disclaimers and pleasantries - when they could instead use a simple look up table to efficiently weed-out the most common/worthless prompts. That isn't the big-brain design innovation that you'd normally expect from top talent. It's not even baseline acceptable from anybody who actually knows the first thing about how computers work, really.
They would rather spend 10 billion dollars on a single computer than to prioritize optimization. Its weird.
But do you want an electronics engineer who understands "instructions", "addresses", "registers", "clocks" and even knows why a pointer works? Or do you want a modern CS major who can use a template to quickly crank out non-scalable apps in a software factory?
These skills are mutually exclusive.
You have to watch an 2-minute ad in order to unlock the privilege to view the same kind of 2-minute ad. I'm not sure weather to call that absurdism or dystopian, but it's nuts. More importantly, it is friction. It actively stops the customer from doing what amazon (or its advertisers) actually want them to do.
This same thoughtlessness to the impacts of decision making has been inexplicably implemented into Amazon's companies at every level. This is a big problem for Amazon customers, especially. Amazon's insistence on advertising blocks customers from spending money. Every unrelated "sponsored" product in the search results gives that much more opportunity for a buyer to look on a different site. Serving an ad has inexplicably become a higher priority than closing a sale. Look at Amazon's "are you really sure you actually want to buy that" page they are now using to try and upsell customers before letting them check out. To say the least, it is a fundamental change in philosophy from the company who invented single-click checkout and "Buy it Now".