ENSHITTIFICATION

What a word! Enshittification really hits home when reflecting on my career experience and personal life. Though initially intended to describe a pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products, this term for systemic product decay has parallels to the backbone of my career. 

In hardware, reliability engineering’s goal is to ensure a product can survive expected end-user usage. Terms such as mission life, unreliability budgets, and usage models are all involved in setting a successful reliability program.  Even with all of the technicals, at the core of a successful reliability program is the surprise and delight of end users. Every consumer I know, including myself, wants to feel that their purchase had good value. Reliability feeds into this. 

So what are the incentives for companies? For one, hardware businesses have to meet regulatory warranty requirements for their customers. Each country may have their own unique regulation and companies are required to certify and comply with respective laws of their sales channels. This is the bare bones of what needs to be met. Outside of the respective regulations, each company needs to make tradeoffs of warranty coverage, design targets, cost, sustainability, features, and brand; just to name a few. Some companies will prioritize being first to market, making trade offs on other vectors to achieve this milestone. Other companies will prioritize cost, again making trade offs on other constraints to achieve this prioritization. This is the natural state of business, companies have different strategies around how to achieve their desired market penetration and which vectors to prioritize. 

Eshittification reflects on products being brought to market with a priority on speed and cost, sacrificing a long-term quality bar to achieve this goal. In one perspective, this can be perceived as the instant gratification of consumerism. Consumers enjoy buying the latest and greatest, which incentivizes annual iterations of a product line. If this is the incentive that maximizes financial revenue, then it is not a surprise that products are designed for this shortened life cycle. 

Now looking into the future, how can we shift away from the enshittification of products? I see the challenge as one of instant gratification of tech. Technology moves fast, but this doesn’t mean technology shouldn’t last. In some areas of technology, I’ve seen a short-term focus to prioritize quick iterative progress. As a strategy, this requires resourcing a short development cycle to ensure your product stays at the forefront of a quickly evolving technology portfolio. Without explicit focus on the longevity of the end product, there becomes a narrow focus on customer satisfaction during only the honeymoon period of product launches (roughly the first 6 months after a product launch). 

I argue that only focussing on the short term lifecycle needs to change. Development and product cycles need to consider retention periods longer than just a warranty cycle. Not only does this improve the probability that a customer will successfully use your product for years to come but it helps generate innovation, improves sustainability, and strengthen the company's brand. Trust in a brand is paramount to a company’s success and having a perception of high quality is a major tailwind to long term staying power.

What are your thoughts on enshittification? Does this term resonate with you?