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Comment by piltdownman | Hacker News Reader

Stockholder value is now predicated entirely on things like recurring revenue, growth, and MBA short-term profit seeking. Enshittification of existing SaaS and 'smart' products is a feature, not a bug.

Unless something drastically changes in the US stock market, any publicly traded technology company of significant size is basically mandated to prostrate themselves to the altar of fiduciary responsibility to stockholders.

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Stockholder value isn't the only metric that matters.

A hardware purchase occurs once, it doesn't come due for extracting or manipulating every quarter.

Ever hear of Farming-as-a-service?

https://agroinformacion.com/en/agtechmachinery/john-deere-su...

Or Driving? BMW had to pivot over initial outrage, but in 2022, they launched a "Functions on Demand" program that required drivers to pay a $18 monthly or $180 annual subscription to unlock physical heated seats and heated steering wheels.

https://www.drive.com.au/news/bmw-admits-heated-seat-subscri...

It’s a tv box.

Which will all have things like reprogrammable firmware and FPGA aspects to support paywalled proprietary features.

We already support it to some extent with licensed hardware codecs (HEVC, AVC, VVC etc...), licensed DRM like HDCP, and individual device licensing for audio technologies like Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and video technologies like Dolby Vision.

https://consumerrights.wiki/

> Ever hear of Farming-as-a-service?

You mean sharecropping? It's been around, in various forms, since pre-Roman times.

I’ve just realised: could shareholders sue for this? E.g. if I’ve bought the stock pre-enshittification, then the conpany decided to prioritize short-term profit, and then some time after the stock price falls (and that’s a big “if”, sure).

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