When you treat your product with contempt soon your customers will too. Our first example is the experience of buying a brand new windows PC by Mike Elgan. Via Marco.
I started looking at the out-of-box experience of buying a Windows PC with a new contempt. The crapware. The stickers. The anti-virus software problem where the cure is worse than the disease. The flimsy hardware. It’s not so much that I despised Windows PCs, but that it felt like Microsoft and the PC makers despised them, like they all have no respect for their own platform.
Example number two is the wretched state of digital news design by Andy Rutledge. Via DF.
Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days.
In both of these scenarios, companies have lost sight of their actual audience. They started treating their product like a NASCAR team, any open space is a space to be sold. I guess it is hard to see the downside of the first sticker or popup ad when someone is ready to hand you the cash. But soon these things add up and overpower your product. Instead of being in the business of making and selling computers you are now in the business of selling prime desktop placement to junk software companies. Instead of being in the business of journalism you are now in the business of clicks. Now your product is something that your customers never wanted in the first place.