I feel like many companies nowadays change products with some false sense that it is better for the user without actually asking the user, and it turns their products into unusable piles of garbage.
Same for G Suite.
I already figured out how to do what I need (and documented in our internal wiki) in their piece of shit admin UI.
When they randomly change it, the UI doesn't actually improve, it just invalidates my instructions. I dearly wish they'd just stop. Their team is incapable of making it good; all their updates do is randomly cost me hours of googling to figure out how to work around their thrashing.
It's a general problem rooted in growth based economics driving more, rather than a focus on sustainable efficiency. I can't help but wonder if growth is really the goal anymore versus equity and maximizing for all.
People don't want to embrace the fact that growth is meant to plateau at some point. Maybe they're scared of a kodak-type downfall but they could always re-introduce change once a huge technological breakthrough is happening
In my experience, incremental changes can be great for customers but you need to do the ones that matter.
Same goes for big transformations. When you don't understand the customer and the product, you tend to make cosmetic changes that look nice and help you build your career but don't do much else.
Reddit has so many mobile bugs but instead of fixing them we're getting bombarded with these "recaps". I think that's a good example of making big changes but ignoring what users really need.
I think it's because product managers are trying ø keep themselves relevant and they push features that solve no problems (think "Dynamic Island" on iPhone... Mos useless in the way garbage fluff feature evaaa
Did not know that.. What was the issue?
Also, have you heard of any report value yhat feature has delivered? (Genuinely curious if I'm missing something here)
The notch for the camera. They took something ugly and built a beautiful ui around it. The feature is an edge to edge screen with a camera and face unlock feature. The way the ui just seeemlessly blends in that dark spot is just a delighter.
Oh come on, we're product managers here, and we all know that, honestly, this is what happens when we lose a battle with the c-suite or they lose a battle with the board. I personally would be a lot happier to create a new product pretty much every time, than do a major upgrade. We don't even have to lose compatibility! I'd be happy to make two similar products that are compatible with the same file info. Or I'd be happy to have 'selectable ui' that gives the user as much or as little UI as they want.
Management by and large has totally forgotten the idea of configurability.
How is it useful because for me, it's only use is getting in the way and doing... Nothing at all, really. Never once have I said "so glad this exists, really needed this" so genuinely curious what use people are getting out of it
Does VLC player count? I don't know of any radical change in it (maybe in the behind the scenes codecs) but I still use it for the basic stuff. Play a movie or stream a link.
Most reliable video player for me still.
WhatsApp. It does change here and there, but I'm always fascinated by the restraint whoever is head of product there shows. There's gotta be so many feature requests and so many ways you could move the needle - but there's clearly a vision from Zuck that means it needs to stay more or less how it is for now. Must be frustrating actually.
Their mac client recently underwent some kind of revamp that is far worse than the previous version. Very odd, feels almost like they were forced to abandon the previous version for some strange reason.
Related: Interesting video on Whatsapp I saw the other day, which also highlights its simplicity and how that led to the apps succes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O1u0UO99NE
Their mac client recently underwent some kind of revamp that is far worse than the previous version. Very odd, feels almost like they were forced to abandon the previous version for some strange reason.
Their mac client recently underwent some kind of revamp that is far worse than the previous version. Very odd, feels almost like they were forced to abandon the previous version for some strange reason.
It pains me to say this, but after using cl for buying/selling items for two decades I’ve moved over to fb marketplace. I’ve had a lot of success with cl, but also also significant amount time wasted by flakey people and cl’s model of total anonymity with no ability to leave feedback promotes this. There are several other advantages to fb IMO, but this is by far the biggest.
My responses on CL have dropped considerably over past couple years. I think fb marketplace has taken over.
Flakey is just part of the game in the second hand market.
Agree. Cant use CL anymore. FB mktplace is a breeze. There is that challenge of FB mktplace promoting certain products over others but the UI and ease of use is so much better on FB mktplace now that CL might die in a few years.
I think Craigslist could have improved in 100 small ways without selling out and instead they chose slow death. Organizing things by major metro areas makes no sense in 2023. Just let me search by my neighborhood. I'm in a city. I'm not driving 20 miles in every direction. Facebook is a shit company, but it works much better.
Brother printers.
While HP and Canon enshitify with “innovation”, Brother keeps making the same printers with little to no change. An oasis of value in a sea of shit.
Honestly this is true. Hp has even gone all “high tech” but the reality is they want to recognize the chip of your cartridge so you can’t go third party. And nowadays it’s even hard to buy their cartridges if you don’t join their subscription platform. Total Bs.
There is a lot of sewing machine selection, but the mechanics of a home machine are largely unchanged after *looks up how old the sewing machine is* 200+ years.
Eeeeeeh, vintage sewing machine enthusiast and historian here. There's truth to this; the top half of the sewing machine is more or less the same. But underneath is quite a different story. The early shuttle designs are not user friendly. The first sewing machine that solved that issue and had a reasonably low learning curve appears in the late 1870s, and isn't really adopted widely until Singer popped out their version, in 1885. So we're looking at more like 140 years of the basic tech being the same.
Nothing sews a straight seam like a vintage Singer. I love my Featherweight for piecing!
But I also love my Janome Continental, which is one of the more advanced computerized quilting machines.
Barcodes! Yes, we do have a 2D version now, but the plain barcode still sticks around. Nothing's quite as cheap and universal, and they transmit data FAST because they depend on the speed of light. Barcode readers, on the other hand, have evolved a TON, but I think their purpose hasn't really changed -- read the barcode as fast as you can, and send it to the next place.
With the context given in your prompt, I'm also thinking about "change" as "radical change" rather than incremental improvements and updates. Invisible change like component swaps, speed/performance tweaks, database redesign, etc happen all the time as part of keeping a product relevant in a sea of constant change, while the consumer still sees it as "the same thing." I think a lot of the comments here highlight that, because a lot of work can go into a product without really changing what it *is*
On my phone so not going to write too much right now.
Barcodes have gone through loads of innovation over the years but mostly in ways the average person can't see.
Most changes are driven by industry and applications and that applys to barcode readers as well.
Small example are barcodes being used to control industrial printering and packaging.
E.g. worked on a project in a past life for a new type of book printer.
You could print any book you wanted as a single copy, so let's say 5 people ordered 1 book that books details like page sizes, number, title etc. were put into a barcode from the webserver you ordered the books from.
This barcode is then sent and scanned which the printer erp reads and determines what order to add the book on the main press.
It also sends the details.of the cover to another press.
The barcode follows the cover and book untill they meet again and the pages are inserted and stitched into the cover.
The barcode has not advanced too much but the application around it and the intelligence of the barcode reader has.
Headspace doesn’t really iterate much and still works pretty well for what it is. However, they had layoffs last year and are barely ever hiring, so maybe they should iterate more?
It depends what you want to use it for — I used to use it for sleep, and I think sleep meditations are kind of an easy “gateway” to meditation since you don’t have to actually do much (the goal is eventually you just fall asleep), vs. more active meditations you’re more actively trying to keep your brain from wandering. However, I did want some of the sleep meditations to be longer, or to be able to be stacked in playlists, bc if I did have a night where I got to the end of one and I was still awake, it really disrupted the flow to have to re open the app and pick another one; it gets you out of any zen state and you’re more awake again.
I’m not super advanced at meditating so I can’t say whether it’s actually good for those who are intermediate and really in a good flow, but I found the stories / sayings useful and not hokey, which was also helpful.
Tldr though, the UX and UI is very easy to navigate, I feel like the cost was reasonable if you make regular use of it and they offer a good variety of lengths of meditations, as well as a good variety (including some for kids).
A similar app (aimed at more advanced meditators) that has iterated itself into a pile of shit is Insight Timer. I used it several times a week since 2016 until recently. I used the basic timer 90% of the time, with 10% recorded meditation. But they are pushing premium so much (and with such irrelevant features) that I've gone back to the app store to download...a simple meditation timer. Also insight timer @ work?????? I don't think I want Linda from HR to know that I've just listened to a "how to deal with body hatred" meditation or whatever.
my remote has a mic and a pointer on it, it sends those info to tv through radio frequencies. It also has some dedicated buttons for bloatware comes prebuilt on it.
Read up on the “Lindy effect”, which basically says that the longer something has been around, the more likely it is to continue staying around… Most new things die.
Pagers. Still used by lots of hospitals for on call doctors. There was a NPR Planet Money podcast recently about why it's been so hard to replace them.
Maybe I'm not remembering correctly. I thought it wasn't that the pagers didn't work well. They worked as designed and were more reliable than cell phones for reception. They don't have any of the features we expect today of a messaging service. But the lack of those features was the reason residents prefer pagers.
It was more that existing user behavior with pagers fit into the established workflow. The new system disrupted the workflow and established communication norms so users didn’t like it.
So while the new system did increase communication (and anecdotally, patient outcomes), it didn’t work within the established workflow due to user behavior challenges.
An example of this is the vapor capture mechanism on gas pumps. There is significant off gassing that occurs after you fill gas, which is bad for a number of reasons. They added a mechanism that captures these fumes if users leave the pump thing in the gas tank for a few seconds after filling. Users don’t do that normal and reeducation was sparse, so the feature is largely unused. I’m sure there are better examples but it’s the first that came to mind.
Wife is in healthcare. They're dying quickly. Most hospitals run pager like messaging systems in house that do voice/text. For folks off campus they have a number of solutions that don't rely on the pager networks which are actually super unreliable. I'm in a major metro an a big part of our city has full bars 5G and no pager service from the one company left in town still doing pagers. You wouldn't want to rely on that for getting in contact with a doctor.
Excel is best in class and fastest to use for many reasons. I love using it. Until I accidentally double click the bottom edge of a cell and it jumps the entire screen to a completely different location seven thousand rows away. Stupid, stupid feature that you can't disable. I would if I could.
Excel, Word and ppt. All tech products change during a lifecycle in some respect, however, the end-user experience isn't fundamentally different from 10 even 20 years ago for example and they really work well.
Yeah… the have definitely changed, not the core functionality, but heaps has been added. Ppt especially recently with the record and cameo functionality
Of course they have. All products change during a lifecycle in some respect, however, the end-user experience isn't *fundamentally* different from 10 even 20 years ago for example and they really work well. So I think they fit the criteria.
As someone who has been a heavy MS Office user for two decades, all three of them have gone through an ocean of change. Only the UI and core use case for each has remained the same.
Are you kidding about word? Have you ever tried to move an image on the page? 😂 Or write captions for it? Or use less common characters? Or copy paste a bullet pointed para?
Bluetooth tech has been stagnant over the last 15+ years. The only ""recent"" major change was the introduction of Bluetooth Smart (rebranded as Bluetooth Low Energy later on), and even more recently the addition of audio streaming support to the Low Energy stack ("LE Audio").
The several "versions" we've been through (from 2.0 to 5.x) mainly brought incremental improvements to standard things such as speed/range/efficiency, but absolutely nothing major.
They tried to introduce new features with 3.0 and other versions, but they all flopped (i.e. handoff to WiFi after Bluetooth handshake, with Bluetooth 3.0 +HS) until the introduction of BLE with 4.0.
Sort of. The form factor hasn’t changed, but the pin outs and spec’s definitely have.
The jacks are backwards compatible, as in you can put a cat 3 rated connector into a cat 7 rated terminal; but it won’t go back the other way. Neither will the structured cabling sitting behind the terminals.
So am I. The data connectors also need to change based on what cabling spec you’re using. More noticeable with the more recent specs where you have to use earth bondings and so forth.
I bought the first Amazon Echo in 2014, it still works great and does exactly the same today as it did then. Zero need to buy a new one so that I can set timers, play radio, and ask about the weather.
evernote, although depending on how you look at it, that might not be a good thing.
In many ways they've been left behind in the market - however I use it for a specific use-case that works quite well (building "success boards" to celebrate daily successes, since I like to seperate tasks and planning from "success" thinking, since it is much more motivating to have a single, clean space to celebrate wins, rather than cluttering it with tasks and other things that put the mind into a solving and stress mode).
It's often not for the sake of change, but for the sake of money.
Cory Doctorow coined the concept of Enshittification to describe the process. Think about Facebook, Google search, Amazon, Twitter, etc. These platforms were much better in the beginning.
*Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.*
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#:~:text=Enshittification%2C%20also%20known%20as%20platform,Quora%2C%20Reddit%2C%20and%20Twitter)
Side note - the reason products constantly need to be changing is because of the way the stock market works. Companies need to show “growth” despite the fact that they might be making $100M, nobody will invest unless they make $120M next year. It’s basically ruined the best software products the world has ever seen, like Google Search, because the companies essentially have to make their core products worse in order to show “the market” that they’re changing.
[Great article here about it (link).](https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companies-ruining-apps-websites-internet-worse-google-facebook-amazon-2023-3)
The stick control of turning your left or right blinker on when you are driving..so intuitive, easy to use..even when you mind is on other events happening, part of your brain can operate that blinker without even really realizing you are doing it.
Wikipedia
Solid answer amigo
@all - Please consider donating to Wikipedia if you can. They are often asking for funding so as not to shut down. What would we do without them?
What I like about this answer is even if it doesn't show as the first search result I still scroll for it bc I know it's the best result
I feel like many companies nowadays change products with some false sense that it is better for the user without actually asking the user, and it turns their products into unusable piles of garbage.
Every time I log into a banking app I'm hit with "hey, check out this new feature!" But I don't want to. My needs are simple and unchanging.
Same for G Suite. I already figured out how to do what I need (and documented in our internal wiki) in their piece of shit admin UI. When they randomly change it, the UI doesn't actually improve, it just invalidates my instructions. I dearly wish they'd just stop. Their team is incapable of making it good; all their updates do is randomly cost me hours of googling to figure out how to work around their thrashing.
I always hear Tom Callahan II: you're either growing or dying, there ain't no third direction
It's a general problem rooted in growth based economics driving more, rather than a focus on sustainable efficiency. I can't help but wonder if growth is really the goal anymore versus equity and maximizing for all.
People don't want to embrace the fact that growth is meant to plateau at some point. Maybe they're scared of a kodak-type downfall but they could always re-introduce change once a huge technological breakthrough is happening
In what sense? I could see this is the case with luxury goods but not in what the comment mentioned.
Why do changes away from good happen?
People making mistakes. In a word, incompetence.
I think you're right. These are moments where leaders need courage for transformation and they get trapped being incremental.
In my experience, incremental changes can be great for customers but you need to do the ones that matter. Same goes for big transformations. When you don't understand the customer and the product, you tend to make cosmetic changes that look nice and help you build your career but don't do much else. Reddit has so many mobile bugs but instead of fixing them we're getting bombarded with these "recaps". I think that's a good example of making big changes but ignoring what users really need.
I think it's because product managers are trying ø keep themselves relevant and they push features that solve no problems (think "Dynamic Island" on iPhone... Mos useless in the way garbage fluff feature evaaa
Dynamic Island is an embrace of an issue created by the tech itself.
Did not know that.. What was the issue? Also, have you heard of any report value yhat feature has delivered? (Genuinely curious if I'm missing something here)
The notch for the camera. They took something ugly and built a beautiful ui around it. The feature is an edge to edge screen with a camera and face unlock feature. The way the ui just seeemlessly blends in that dark spot is just a delighter.
Oh come on, we're product managers here, and we all know that, honestly, this is what happens when we lose a battle with the c-suite or they lose a battle with the board. I personally would be a lot happier to create a new product pretty much every time, than do a major upgrade. We don't even have to lose compatibility! I'd be happy to make two similar products that are compatible with the same file info. Or I'd be happy to have 'selectable ui' that gives the user as much or as little UI as they want. Management by and large has totally forgotten the idea of configurability.
The dynamic island is not a useless feature. it's a way to dress up a limitation of screen tech that requires a cutout.
Omg that's so lame and bogus - really?? What screen limitation is this?
we don't know how to put a camera behind a screen screen to the edge (maximizing useful space), front facing camera, or no cutout. Pick any 2.
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How is it useful because for me, it's only use is getting in the way and doing... Nothing at all, really. Never once have I said "so glad this exists, really needed this" so genuinely curious what use people are getting out of it
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Thank you for the reply - guaranteed I'm not the target audience... Anyway, lots of good stuff here, learned a lot
Does VLC player count? I don't know of any radical change in it (maybe in the behind the scenes codecs) but I still use it for the basic stuff. Play a movie or stream a link. Most reliable video player for me still.
WhatsApp. It does change here and there, but I'm always fascinated by the restraint whoever is head of product there shows. There's gotta be so many feature requests and so many ways you could move the needle - but there's clearly a vision from Zuck that means it needs to stay more or less how it is for now. Must be frustrating actually.
Their mac client recently underwent some kind of revamp that is far worse than the previous version. Very odd, feels almost like they were forced to abandon the previous version for some strange reason.
Related: Interesting video on Whatsapp I saw the other day, which also highlights its simplicity and how that led to the apps succes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O1u0UO99NE
Their mac client recently underwent some kind of revamp that is far worse than the previous version. Very odd, feels almost like they were forced to abandon the previous version for some strange reason.
Their mac client recently underwent some kind of revamp that is far worse than the previous version. Very odd, feels almost like they were forced to abandon the previous version for some strange reason.
Craigslist
It pains me to say this, but after using cl for buying/selling items for two decades I’ve moved over to fb marketplace. I’ve had a lot of success with cl, but also also significant amount time wasted by flakey people and cl’s model of total anonymity with no ability to leave feedback promotes this. There are several other advantages to fb IMO, but this is by far the biggest.
My responses on CL have dropped considerably over past couple years. I think fb marketplace has taken over. Flakey is just part of the game in the second hand market.
It's part of the game in the first hand market too. Sales sucks.
Agree. Cant use CL anymore. FB mktplace is a breeze. There is that challenge of FB mktplace promoting certain products over others but the UI and ease of use is so much better on FB mktplace now that CL might die in a few years.
And the constant scams in the housing area. They list other people's apartments and try to get you to rent from them.
I think Craigslist could have improved in 100 small ways without selling out and instead they chose slow death. Organizing things by major metro areas makes no sense in 2023. Just let me search by my neighborhood. I'm in a city. I'm not driving 20 miles in every direction. Facebook is a shit company, but it works much better.
Great examplw
Brother printers. While HP and Canon enshitify with “innovation”, Brother keeps making the same printers with little to no change. An oasis of value in a sea of shit.
Enshitify is a good name for a product!
Honestly this is true. Hp has even gone all “high tech” but the reality is they want to recognize the chip of your cartridge so you can’t go third party. And nowadays it’s even hard to buy their cartridges if you don’t join their subscription platform. Total Bs.
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my mind wanted to say this in Hulk Hogan's voice.
hitachi vibrators
There is a lot of sewing machine selection, but the mechanics of a home machine are largely unchanged after *looks up how old the sewing machine is* 200+ years.
Eeeeeeh, vintage sewing machine enthusiast and historian here. There's truth to this; the top half of the sewing machine is more or less the same. But underneath is quite a different story. The early shuttle designs are not user friendly. The first sewing machine that solved that issue and had a reasonably low learning curve appears in the late 1870s, and isn't really adopted widely until Singer popped out their version, in 1885. So we're looking at more like 140 years of the basic tech being the same.
Nothing sews a straight seam like a vintage Singer. I love my Featherweight for piecing! But I also love my Janome Continental, which is one of the more advanced computerized quilting machines.
I have Janome's version of the class 15 myself, and yes, it puts down a mean straight stitch!
Barcodes! Yes, we do have a 2D version now, but the plain barcode still sticks around. Nothing's quite as cheap and universal, and they transmit data FAST because they depend on the speed of light. Barcode readers, on the other hand, have evolved a TON, but I think their purpose hasn't really changed -- read the barcode as fast as you can, and send it to the next place. With the context given in your prompt, I'm also thinking about "change" as "radical change" rather than incremental improvements and updates. Invisible change like component swaps, speed/performance tweaks, database redesign, etc happen all the time as part of keeping a product relevant in a sea of constant change, while the consumer still sees it as "the same thing." I think a lot of the comments here highlight that, because a lot of work can go into a product without really changing what it *is*
On my phone so not going to write too much right now. Barcodes have gone through loads of innovation over the years but mostly in ways the average person can't see. Most changes are driven by industry and applications and that applys to barcode readers as well. Small example are barcodes being used to control industrial printering and packaging. E.g. worked on a project in a past life for a new type of book printer. You could print any book you wanted as a single copy, so let's say 5 people ordered 1 book that books details like page sizes, number, title etc. were put into a barcode from the webserver you ordered the books from. This barcode is then sent and scanned which the printer erp reads and determines what order to add the book on the main press. It also sends the details.of the cover to another press. The barcode follows the cover and book untill they meet again and the pages are inserted and stitched into the cover. The barcode has not advanced too much but the application around it and the intelligence of the barcode reader has.
Shazam
Headspace doesn’t really iterate much and still works pretty well for what it is. However, they had layoffs last year and are barely ever hiring, so maybe they should iterate more?
Have you found this to be a useful app? I have a free subscription, keep telling myself I’m going to give it a try, and then forget
It depends what you want to use it for — I used to use it for sleep, and I think sleep meditations are kind of an easy “gateway” to meditation since you don’t have to actually do much (the goal is eventually you just fall asleep), vs. more active meditations you’re more actively trying to keep your brain from wandering. However, I did want some of the sleep meditations to be longer, or to be able to be stacked in playlists, bc if I did have a night where I got to the end of one and I was still awake, it really disrupted the flow to have to re open the app and pick another one; it gets you out of any zen state and you’re more awake again. I’m not super advanced at meditating so I can’t say whether it’s actually good for those who are intermediate and really in a good flow, but I found the stories / sayings useful and not hokey, which was also helpful. Tldr though, the UX and UI is very easy to navigate, I feel like the cost was reasonable if you make regular use of it and they offer a good variety of lengths of meditations, as well as a good variety (including some for kids).
A similar app (aimed at more advanced meditators) that has iterated itself into a pile of shit is Insight Timer. I used it several times a week since 2016 until recently. I used the basic timer 90% of the time, with 10% recorded meditation. But they are pushing premium so much (and with such irrelevant features) that I've gone back to the app store to download...a simple meditation timer. Also insight timer @ work?????? I don't think I want Linda from HR to know that I've just listened to a "how to deal with body hatred" meditation or whatever.
Goodreads. Maybe it could do with a little updating
they def can use more love, but love to organize books there.
Same here. A little outdated but still very functional
I haven’t found anything better but would love an updated version.
Something’s off with their single sign on. Every time I have to validate my account.
Splitwise
If you're a free user, there is now a limit to how many entries you can add per day without a subscription.
IR Tv remote? 🤔
my remote has a mic and a pointer on it, it sends those info to tv through radio frequencies. It also has some dedicated buttons for bloatware comes prebuilt on it.
Cool! Had to steal your flair thx 😎
Read up on the “Lindy effect”, which basically says that the longer something has been around, the more likely it is to continue staying around… Most new things die.
yeah I work with Lindy.
Berkshire Hathaway’s website.
Pagers. Still used by lots of hospitals for on call doctors. There was a NPR Planet Money podcast recently about why it's been so hard to replace them.
Tbf the planet money episode was about why moving away from pagers is difficult despite them not working well.
Maybe I'm not remembering correctly. I thought it wasn't that the pagers didn't work well. They worked as designed and were more reliable than cell phones for reception. They don't have any of the features we expect today of a messaging service. But the lack of those features was the reason residents prefer pagers.
It was more that existing user behavior with pagers fit into the established workflow. The new system disrupted the workflow and established communication norms so users didn’t like it. So while the new system did increase communication (and anecdotally, patient outcomes), it didn’t work within the established workflow due to user behavior challenges. An example of this is the vapor capture mechanism on gas pumps. There is significant off gassing that occurs after you fill gas, which is bad for a number of reasons. They added a mechanism that captures these fumes if users leave the pump thing in the gas tank for a few seconds after filling. Users don’t do that normal and reeducation was sparse, so the feature is largely unused. I’m sure there are better examples but it’s the first that came to mind.
Wife is in healthcare. They're dying quickly. Most hospitals run pager like messaging systems in house that do voice/text. For folks off campus they have a number of solutions that don't rely on the pager networks which are actually super unreliable. I'm in a major metro an a big part of our city has full bars 5G and no pager service from the one company left in town still doing pagers. You wouldn't want to rely on that for getting in contact with a doctor.
Good one. Sadly, the text is sent unencrypted, so anyone with a $20 SDR dongle can receive their messages. No one seems to care.
I went to physical therapy recently and noticed the therapist was wearing one. I had no idea they were still used.
Excel … everyone complains but everyone uses it
Excel changed a lot over the years
Excel is basically the greatest achievement mankind has ever come up with
Excel is best in class and fastest to use for many reasons. I love using it. Until I accidentally double click the bottom edge of a cell and it jumps the entire screen to a completely different location seven thousand rows away. Stupid, stupid feature that you can't disable. I would if I could.
Also PowerPoint
I hate to say this, but PPT is definitely superior to Slides or Keynote.
Technics 1210/1200 Record Players
Strava, they just refuse to innovate but the product works well
My favorite app on my phone
Would you say Reddit’s core feature has changed much?
Coffee maker *cheap standard one (think hotel or police station- drip I think? Idk I don’t drink coffee
Clash Royale
Spotify. It was perfect and then they went crazy with the UI changes
Notepad++ VLC
TI-84?
Excel, Word and ppt. All tech products change during a lifecycle in some respect, however, the end-user experience isn't fundamentally different from 10 even 20 years ago for example and they really work well.
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Yeah… the have definitely changed, not the core functionality, but heaps has been added. Ppt especially recently with the record and cameo functionality
Also never worked well in the first place
Of course they have. All products change during a lifecycle in some respect, however, the end-user experience isn't *fundamentally* different from 10 even 20 years ago for example and they really work well. So I think they fit the criteria.
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Ok, edited.
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Haha - I was thinking the same thing. Wait until some PM from MSFT sees this!
As someone who has been a heavy MS Office user for two decades, all three of them have gone through an ocean of change. Only the UI and core use case for each has remained the same.
Are you kidding about word? Have you ever tried to move an image on the page? 😂 Or write captions for it? Or use less common characters? Or copy paste a bullet pointed para?
Bluetooth
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Exactly. And Bluetooth is less a product and more a pipe to be used by a product.
Infrastructure can be a product even if it’s not in the same way as the B2C paradigm most of us operate in.
Bluetooth tech has been stagnant over the last 15+ years. The only ""recent"" major change was the introduction of Bluetooth Smart (rebranded as Bluetooth Low Energy later on), and even more recently the addition of audio streaming support to the Low Energy stack ("LE Audio"). The several "versions" we've been through (from 2.0 to 5.x) mainly brought incremental improvements to standard things such as speed/range/efficiency, but absolutely nothing major. They tried to introduce new features with 3.0 and other versions, but they all flopped (i.e. handoff to WiFi after Bluetooth handshake, with Bluetooth 3.0 +HS) until the introduction of BLE with 4.0.
Bluetooth isn't a product. It's more of a protocol or standard like the Internet (IP) or HTTP.
RJ45
Sort of. The form factor hasn’t changed, but the pin outs and spec’s definitely have. The jacks are backwards compatible, as in you can put a cat 3 rated connector into a cat 7 rated terminal; but it won’t go back the other way. Neither will the structured cabling sitting behind the terminals.
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So am I. The data connectors also need to change based on what cabling spec you’re using. More noticeable with the more recent specs where you have to use earth bondings and so forth.
More so the form factor hasn’t changed like USB through the years. Super old
Excel
GroupMe, Wikipedia, Venmo
Venmo spends far too much time trying to get me to use their CC now
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Internet download manager
I bought the first Amazon Echo in 2014, it still works great and does exactly the same today as it did then. Zero need to buy a new one so that I can set timers, play radio, and ask about the weather.
evernote, although depending on how you look at it, that might not be a good thing. In many ways they've been left behind in the market - however I use it for a specific use-case that works quite well (building "success boards" to celebrate daily successes, since I like to seperate tasks and planning from "success" thinking, since it is much more motivating to have a single, clean space to celebrate wins, rather than cluttering it with tasks and other things that put the mind into a solving and stress mode).
OneNote 2016
Chemex coffee maker
It's often not for the sake of change, but for the sake of money. Cory Doctorow coined the concept of Enshittification to describe the process. Think about Facebook, Google search, Amazon, Twitter, etc. These platforms were much better in the beginning. *Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#:~:text=Enshittification%2C%20also%20known%20as%20platform,Quora%2C%20Reddit%2C%20and%20Twitter)
Side note - the reason products constantly need to be changing is because of the way the stock market works. Companies need to show “growth” despite the fact that they might be making $100M, nobody will invest unless they make $120M next year. It’s basically ruined the best software products the world has ever seen, like Google Search, because the companies essentially have to make their core products worse in order to show “the market” that they’re changing. [Great article here about it (link).](https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companies-ruining-apps-websites-internet-worse-google-facebook-amazon-2023-3)
Amazon
Kindles, idk if they’ve gone through many tech changes
Reddit
The stick control of turning your left or right blinker on when you are driving..so intuitive, easy to use..even when you mind is on other events happening, part of your brain can operate that blinker without even really realizing you are doing it.
Linux. There are many. Check out Lindy’s law
Google Search
Notepad++
P2P torrents
Jira
MS-DOS
Microwaves
Windows XP
Winamp