The Law

In the context of enshittification, there is one law that seems to be a constant. I mentionned it here and here:

Every piece of software will evolve beyond its intended purpose to sell you something.

It can be steering you to the vendors’ own products, or simply displaying advertisement in general, like adding ads to a device you already bought as Amazon is hurting for cash. It is build into the product design, in spite of the user experience.

Ads in the Apple app store, that when you lookup for the official app of an airline to get you boarding passes, make the first entry being something else, NOT what you are looking for. ✅ It should be noted that Apple core business is not advertisment but aledegly delivering the best user experience.

The Verge has a new examples: Roku’s idea of showing ads on your HDMI inputs seems like an inevitable hell:

In this week’s edition of his Lowpass newsletter, Janko Roettgers covered a Roku patent that seems to telegraph that the company is planning some heavy advertising tactics for those who purchase Roku TV televisions. The patent centers around the idea of displaying ads on these TVs whenever they’re tuned to an HDMI input that’s paused or idle.

Sounds like a hellscape. Roku already had a policy that to use their devices, you needed an account and that to create an account you needed to provide a credit card number (that was 10 years ago). For what? To use a device you paid for. Roku software equip a lot of low end television sets, and usually isn’t that bad according to users.

Note that this is a patent and not an actual product, but nonetheless, sounds of good path to enshittification.

Another example is Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu. You read that right, in the start menuu, the main UI element to start applications on Windows, will become a billboard:

Microsoft says it’s starting to test ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11. The software maker will use the Recommended section of the Start menu, which usually shows file recommendations, to suggest apps from the Microsoft Store.

It’s already in Windows 10 it seems, and they already tried in the Windows 11 File Explorer, albeit backed out claiming it shouldn’t have been there in the first place, that it was a bug.