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Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

(www.nytimes.com)
388 points pseudolus | 3 comments | 25 Mar 25 17:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Bukhmanizer ◴[26 Mar 25 19:14 UTC] No.43485838[source]▶
I’m surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they’re doing less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have one: AI. It’s not that we’re using AI to make all these small improvements, or even planning on it. We’re just… not doing them. And I don’t think my experience is very unique.
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nickff ◴[26 Mar 25 19:32 UTC] No.43486104[source]▶
De-scoping is also a commonly-cited result of higher interest rates. We recently lived through a prolonged episode of zero-interest-rate-policy (ZIRP), which encouraged long-term and risky projects. When interest rates go up, the minimum acceptable return-on-investment (ROI) required to lure investment money away from low-risk investments like government bonds also increases correspondingly.
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echelon ◴[26 Mar 25 22:13 UTC] No.43488046[source]▶
I'd be willing to bet that the biggest reason is that there hasn't been any antitrust action against the big tech companies. They just sit at the top, siphoning value from every other market in the world. If you need to use the internet in any way, FAANG taxes you.

None of these big tech companies really need to grow bigger. The smartphone is essentially done. AWS just prints money. Social/consumer apps are "done". What more is for them to do but collect rent?

The US government needs to break them all up. That'll oxygenate the entire tech sector, unlock value for investors, and kickstart the playing field for startups.

Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and maybe Microsoft. Break them up.

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zombiwoof ◴[26 Mar 25 22:35 UTC] No.43488256[source]▶
Maybe Microsoft
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echelon ◴[26 Mar 25 22:44 UTC] No.43488320[source]▶
Apart from their gaming department absorbing every big competitor, I can't think of ways Microsoft is abusing monopoly power like the rest of the mentioned companies.
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autoexec ◴[26 Mar 25 22:51 UTC] No.43488382[source]▶
How about turning Windows into an advertising and data collection platform. Sucking up vast amounts of people's personal data, even corporate data, to leverage against their customers so that MS can take in more profit.
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1. globnomulous ◴[26 Mar 25 23:47 UTC] No.43488859{3}[source]▶
I'm much less concerned about this -- as far as I'm aware, the data collection is standard telemetry that any software provider would want, and the stuff related to advertising is, I think, largely concerned with app recommendations in the Microsoft store -- than I am about anti-competitive bundling practices.
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2. autoexec ◴[27 Mar 25 00:36 UTC] No.43489171[source]▶
Microsoft may call what they collect telemetry, but it goes way beyond what I'd want or expect to shared with a bunch of strangers at whatever company made the software I'm using. It'd take a whistleblower (or more likely multiple whistleblowers) for us to know everything MS is doing with that data, but they've been shoving ads all over the OS for a long time.

I'm struggling to think of a part of the OS that hasn't had ads shoved into it... the terminal I guess... There have been ads in the start menu, the lock screen, in pop up notices, in the file explorer, in search results, in the control panel, on the task bar, in the share pane, in windows update and in a bunch of windows apps like ink workspace. They've even just force-installed random programs to people's systems.

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3. globnomulous ◴[27 Mar 25 01:14 UTC] No.43489431[source]▶
That (edit: second paragraph) is fair and a good point. Maybe Android has desensitized me to advertising and crap-/bloatware.

I'd wager, too, that the addition of the garbage you're describing has coincided with the OS's worsening performance. File Explorer performance is so abysmal that it may as well be an Electron app.

On the other hand (edit: regarding your first paragraph), Microsoft seems very serious about not falling afoul of the law, probably because of the cost of the anti-trust litigation they faced in the 90s and 2000s(?). It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were nothing for a whistleblower to blow the whistle on.