Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.

  • Intralexical@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The fact that things like Netflix/Uber/AirBnB are useful and good value when they first come out and then turn to shit later shows that they can work and be successful, they just get greedy and go sideways.

    Um, no.

    You have to turn a certain amount of potential energy into kinetic energy in order to provide a service that drives a customer from one location to another in an automobile. You have to squeeze a certain amount of information into the same or similar coaxial or optical or whatever-it-is-these-days cables in order to deliver a video and audio stream onto a customer’s television (and pay enough for the same actors and writers to produce that media in the first place). You have to pay a certain amount in property tax, cleaning, and maintenance in order to provide a clean bed for a customer to sleep on.

    Yeah I was gonna say, there’s nothing wrong with the technology itself per se, just the way it’s being used/exploited.

    The “technology” itself was at most tangential to the service being provided, and the costs of providing the service. Also, the real technology involved hasn’t actually changed. A car is still a car, a co-ax is still a co-ax, and a building is still a building.

    An app was never going to change physics. We were probably idiots to think it would.