I've used the word "flockintech" a few times now, most of you will have gathered it's a portmanteau word for "F'ing Lock-in Technology," but how many people are aware of just how much flockintech we are actually stuck with already? And this also goes ,for our techie/geeky focus in my blogs, particularly for technology products and software.
I've pointed out the matter of John Deere tractors (and yes they are "technology" because technology is inextricably tied up with almost every machinery technology) and a Polish railway that had to hack a piece of carriage-disabling malware that the carriage manufacturer introduced into the carriages to ensure they had to always be heavily used and regularly "serviced" by the manufacturer, which caused significant downtime for the railway and was eventually fixed by an anonymous hacker group removing the malware from the carriages.
There's a video platform where people have paid to save videos and as the company founders, are unable to keep the videos they've saved on the platform. There have been several other online properties that sold a permanent product to their customers and then said products became unusable when the company went tits-up and the servers were switched off.
Got A Fitbit?
I'll start off, for now, among the first items on this week's "Download This Show" podcast is the Fitbit Update Bricking And upRoar incident I'm choosing to call FUBAR. (Yep. Look FUBAR up if you don't already know what it means and where it came from...) Marc mentions in the podcast that Google are being a bit coy about the update possibly/possibly not causing the fitbits to go from a battery life measurable in days, to a battery life measurable in around 60 minutes.
I can tell you what I think. Enshittification. That's how you add or subtract features to an existing successful product, and (as the name suggests) turning said product into ka-ka. My newsletter software is a case in point, offered a free-forever low volume product,realised that meant a lot of small bloggers like myself, and at first began adding bloat features I'll never use, and finally, when they realised after a year that we who can't afford it, simply can't afford to go to the Pro version, so they've introduced a "we're turning this server to a Pro server and you'll have to follow this five thousand word guide to move your existing newsletter to another server just for Free tier users."
I voted with my feet, I have few newsletter users, very little free time to be moving them to another platform or whatever, the newsletter will have to wait. If I had a few donations I could just Pro-ify the existing account again but as I have neither I'll get to it when convenient.
Back to the Fitbit:- Google bought the company and began integrating it with their own ecosystem, which was fantastic for the fairly basic thing the Fitbit was in its infancy. (They mention this in the podcast.)
They also mention that Google now has a smart watch product of their own that does what the Fitbit does among a host of other features. I'd be enshittifying the hell out of the Fitbit if I was the person marketing the Google Watch which is purpose-designed to work in their ecosystem, and mayber that's what's just happened. Stay tuned to this - will a new update be able to reverse and fix the last update, or will it turn out that the software update overdrove some components that then shorted out and will now the affected Fitbits now be rendered unusable?
Got Windows?
This has to be my favourite example of enshittification and flockintech ever. Windows 2 - almost no-one knew about. Windows 3 - much the same. But there wasn't an upgrade path. You bought each version. Windows 3.11 (the first one with networking and thus the first natively Internet-capable Windows operating system) I think was the same.
And it's not like you could afford to keep using W3.11 to this very day. For a start, it's well-known and has well-known exploits. Microsoft started offering some security updates but of course support stopped because they wanted us to buy the next great OS from them. For a another, the hardware it ran on is hard to get. (Although I have to note that just recently, a job opening for a Windows 3.11 Administrator has become one of the most rarified jobs in IT, and probably the last workplace to use this version of Windows which would by now be over twenty years old, and replaced by Windows 95 in 1995.)
There have been 27 versions of Windows since W95, some upgrades, some for different tasks (server vs workstation etc) with 14 just being upgrades of W10. Until W10, you bought each new version of Windows as it cam out. W10 offered free installation to owners of approved older operating systems, so not quite as much money was made on W10, and some enshittification resulted, where things were added to W10 to allow exfiltration of the "owner's" usage data, and a whole lot more details.
W11 has been described as a "Spy in a trenchcoat" it exfiltrates so much user data. Losing so much of my personal information constitutes enshittification to me.
Also, even if you own one of the earlier Windows versions and are still happy with it, Microsoft tries to lock you into their upgrade cycle by ending update support for the old version. You may say "Big ****ing deal" to that but Internet security is one of the things that you'll no longer get updates for. And the older an operating system, the more vulnerabilities are found, even after Microsoft stops patching. Due to the fact that while you notionally "own" that version of Windows, you have no access to the code, so you can't fix new vulnerabilities yourself. So in that sense you're either locked-in to their versions cycle, or locked-in to being hacked within five minutes of putting your new re-installation of your OS online.
EverNote
I've had an account on Evernote since before forever or even further back. The free account was fine for me, I didn't turn that much traffic or quantity on the servers, I used it well within the usage limits for a free account. I only used it to keep blogging notes current between my laptop, my PC, and my phone. Not long after I got it working for me the way I needed, They reduced the number of devices I could use it on. No longer useful. And the other day I wanted to download my notes for historic reasons, and I have to install the PC app just to make an archive. I will. But then Evernote will see one less user for their enshittification, lock-in, and general bait-and-switch tactics.
I'm just listening to another enshittified product:
TED Talks Daily
This one isn't flockintech but definitely enshittified. I've been listening to the 'cast for ages, and ads. And I cast them to the TV when in the lounge because it feels more natural to me to listen to stuff on speakers while working. (As I'm doing right now, listening to a TED Talk on climate technologiews that are worth supporting.)
Ads. TV and radio have long been legislated into keeping the audio and colour saturation levels down to normal levels. The audio level of a commercial must be the same as the program material, preventing those SHOUTY!!! ads on TV that used to shake the house in an effort to get your attention.
Apparently, there's no such restraint placed on TED Talks Daily. While my wife's unwell, she needs bed rest. It's all the way at the other end of the house from the loungeroom, but in order to hear the program 3-4metres away from the screen, I need a certain volume level.
That level is inaudible in the bedroom, but the ads on the podcast are loud enough to wake a person in the bedroom. So in a way TTD has locked me into earhpones or earbuds.
Others?
I said earlier that I'll go back and find a few more of the thousands of great technologies that gradually enshittified and locked-in their users bit by bit to the point of killing their business, and I will. I suggest you bookmark this page and come back to it in a few weeks. Also maybe share it, and maybe make a small donation to help me keep things online, maybe afford a better newsletter provider, and pay for the subscriptions I keep so I can keep up with the news I post here.
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