Big Tech Doesn’t Care If Their Products Suck
Did they ever?
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Who’s still shocked when a new product from Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Samsung hits the market?
I used to be. Not anymore.
Because most products suck these days, don’t they? And if they don’t suck, they’re at least coming with notable problems.
That’s not by accident.
Big tech doesn’t care if their products suck. They just don’t. They don’t have to.
It isn’t about quality slipping through the cracks. It’s a strategy. Ship fast, fail fast, and make billions regardless. Just like fast fashion.
Big Tech stopped trying to “delight” us a long time ago (if they ever did).
Failing Up Since 1975
Nobody fails like Microsoft.
This company is the undisputed king of embarrassing product lines. The Zune, Windows Phone, Cortana, Internet Explorer, or the Surface RT.
Yeah…
Some even had a bit of promise, I’d say. But not enough that they mattered.
And Microsoft is doing just fine.
Actually, they’re doing more than fine. They’re one of the most valuable companies in the world.
They’re B2B dominance.
Azure cloud is massive. Office 365 subscriptions, cha-ching. GitHub, bought it. What more do they need, right?
Microsoft doesn’t care if you hate Bing. They care if Fortune 500 companies sign multi-year contracts.
If the consumer experience sucks, but the enterprise pipeline is happy, it’s a win.
Resilience, not relevance. It’s genius…
Minimalism or Minimal Effort?
Apple used to be the gold standard for beautiful, intuitive design.
Now they’re the gold standard for… I don’t know… Expensive stuff.
And removing stuff, maybe.
You know, like removing the headphone jack and selling it back to you as a $200 pair of AirPods.
Or launching a $1,000 monitor stand. Or shipping iPads with M chips that can’t multitask. Well, at least they fixed a bit of that this year.
But we’re still buying from Apple. Because iMessage. Because AirDrop. Because the ecosystem has us locked-in justtight enough to be annoying, but not quite enough to make a switch.
Apple just doesn’t care anymore.
They’re making record profits from dongles and iCloud storage plans. Every subpar product is just another funnel into the walled garden of gold.
Design still matters, but not more than quarterly earnings.
Apple isn’t trying to change the world, they’re just trying to up-sell you on iCloud+.
Killing Products (and Expectations)
Ah, Google…
Remember Google+? Stadia? Inbox? Google Wave? How about Allo? No? Well, Google doesn’t remember them either.
Google kills products the way most of us kill time.
Randomly. Ruthlessly. And all the time.
They’ve trained us not to expect any better. Every new app or service comes with a silent expiration date. We’re basically beta testing objects.
Even Android — their most successful product — feels neglected.
Updates are delayed, fragmentation is wild, and Pixel phones are like concept cars. Cool ideas, but somehow always flawed.
But they don’t care. Google makes 80% of its money from ads. Not phones. Not apps. Not hardware.
Your search queries are worth more than any product. As long as we’re still googling “Why does my Pixel overheat”, they’re winning.
Throw It at the Wall and See What Folds
Samsung is the tech industry’s chaotic cousin.
You never quite know what they’re doing, and honestly, I think neither do they.
Foldable phones. Refrigerators with Instagram. Smartwatches that track your stress (probably causing it too).
Samsung makes everything. Fast. The product strategy is quantity over quality.
Their phones come with features no one asked for, pre-installed apps no one uses, and marketing campaigns that scream “we’re innovative”. They’re not.
And yes, they sell millions of units every year. Because they’re everywhere.
Samsung is the Coca-Cola of tech. Omnipresent, predictable, and kind of disappointing, but still the default for billions of people.
They don’t need to care if one product bombs. Because five others will ship next week.
The Game
The rule should be: “Make something great and people will buy it.”
It isn’t. Big tech has already monetized us. They don’t need great products anymore.
They’re building ecosystems, ad platforms, subscriptions, and data pipelines. The product is almost irrelevant, as long as we stay inside the funnel.
We don’t need a great smartphone. We need one that works just well enough to keep us on iOS or Android. We don’t need the best search engine. We need the one that keeps showing us ads while feeling a bit useful. We don’t need a great laptop. We need one that lets us log into our subscriptions.
Big tech can afford to fail. Over and over again. Their scale protects them. Their stock prices. We users are too locked in to leave.
Sometimes, failure is the point. A failed product can still gather data, test a market, kill a competitor, or build a patent. It’s a strategic write-off.
When you control the infrastructure, the OS, the app store, and the cloud, the actual product is just the bait.
The Bottom Line
“Well, that’s just how it is, right?”
Yeah, unfortunately, it is. And we can’t do much about it.
They’ll keep shipping trash until we stop buying it.
But we won’t stop buying, will we?
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