From Products to Obstacles Wrapped in Subscriptions: the Decline of Craftsmanship and of an Industry

We used to build products. Now all we build is obstacles wrapped in subscriptions.

Companies sell their products with an implicit promise. That they did their best to make the customer’s life better. That things will work well for the foreseeable future. That no additional unexpected costs will pop up at some point.

These days, this is a lie.

Companies don’t necessarily set out to destroy value, they just lose the ability to create it without also losing the appetite for those rewards that creating value for customers brings. They hire skilled and passionate people and then trap them in a system that prioritizes short-term capture over long-term utility and delighting customers.

It’s a betrayal of the craft, that’s what this is. And it’s a betrayal of the customer.

Look at your product. It’s not a solution. It’s a collection of exposed internal complexities that nobody had the courage to burn down. A collage of features thrown at the wall by different people, partially built, poorly integrated, and without a shred of overarching design.

We’ve become so lazy that we ask our users to do our work for us. And yet:

• No customer wants to edit the fields of a row in a grid to do anything.
• No user wants to figure out how to navigate maze-like nested menus to unsubscribe from your product trial before it auto-renews for a year.
• And definitely nobody wants to pray for ten seconds of connectivity not to lose the work they tried to do in the tube.

Somebody stated that people don’t buy a 1/4-inch drill, but that they want a 1/4-inch hole. And yet in modern Saas, we don’t give them the hole. Nor the drill. What we give them is a subscription to a configurable drill-management platform. Because our organization is too fragmented and focused on itself to ship anything else.

We force them to manually calibrate the bit and save the drill’s state every five minutes. Because strong opinions and top-down product design became dangerous in organizations often run and designed by corporate sheep.

This industry loves to claim that doing things the right way is too expensive. That we have to cut corners to stay lean.

That’s a lie.

Building it right isn’t more expensive than doing it poorly. It doesn’t require a bigger budget. It requires deep thinking and taking risks.

But modern companies have disincentivized both. Taking risks means sometimes being wrong, and being wrong is a career risk in an environment that prizes safe incremental gains over outsized discontinuous improvement. Thinking deep is quiet. It looks like inactivity to the incompetent middle manager with a Gantt chart. It doesn’t make things move up and to the right every single day.

In a system that rewards predictability, consensus, measurable progress, and visible activity, mediocrity reigns, while greatness is treated as a disease.

So we take the path of least resistance. We ship the minimum viable overhead. Because a status bar is easier to explain to a stakeholder than an automated workflow that understands human intent.

We optimized for shipping trash, because the metrics for trash are easier to track than the metrics for quality.

If your company rewards moving tickets and punishes stopping to think and failed experiments, you aren’t building a product. You’re just managing a decline.

Start shipping the reality you promised, instead of the ugliness of your corporate processes and politics. Tomorrow, choose a difficult “no” over an easy “yes”. Go back to obsessing over quality and making your customer’s life better. And, for the love of God, rid yourself of these meaningless executors that somehow wormed their way up your corporate ladder without an ounce of passion or skills.