PSA: Features are never prioritized for users. Features are prioritized for the paying customer.
This is such a naive mistake to make. This is why the freemium business model is doomed to shitty products, and explains pretty much why the Internet economy is in the sorry state that it is. If you don’t pay for the service (regardless of your preferred economic stance, either directly or through taxes) you have absolutely no right to complain.
Windows features are not prioritized for those paying customers who bought licenses, but linux features are prioritized for non-paying linux users.
The real answer is that for profit companies develop features to maximize their profits. User-prioritized features are only added to the extent that they draw and maintain customers. Outside of that, companies don’t care if you’re happy or not, regardless of how much you’ve paid.
I was with you until this. This is the kind of handwaving devs use to shield themselves from criticism for idiotic choices. There’s “you’re not entitled to support or to have your requests taken seriously if you aren’t supporting development” and there’s “don’t you dare voice a negative opinion on anything I’ve done”.
I’ve lost count of how many slack or discord channels I’ve been in where devs seem to take basic feedback as a personal attack.
Even paying customers aren’t guaranteed feature priority. Have you even seen Windows outside of EU markets? You pay well over $100 for a license, and they shove a wheelbarrow’s worth of ads and data extraction up your ass. See also: the cableification of streaming services. (EDIT: Oh, and I forgot about Adobe!)
The Internet Economy doesn’t need a freemium model to be shit. In fact some of the worse SaaS I interact with on a daily basis is also extremely expensive.
It’s got everything to do with misaligned financial incentives already plaguing traditional markets (pursuit of infinite growth, short term thinking, etc.) compounded by how quick and easy software is to change and update which yields very high feature bloat and a much faster cycle of enshittification.
UX and UI aren’t magic bullets. They constantly come up with and approve the most anti-user crap. They are just as disconnected from the actual user base as a database engineer.
No. A stakeholder is anyone with an interest in the project. Where you consider the importance of a particular stakeholder vs another is a different question.
Add comment