I wonder how much of this is due to being a public company. Shareholders want to see their investment go up, so companies need to keep doing things like this to increase their value and revenues.
I wish they didn’t think that this was the way to add value. They should move into new areas and focus on stability.
Unfortunately, modern companies seem to forget that it used to be cool to simply make some profit, even if it was modest and trickling in at a slow pace. It was more important to have continuous and stable profits, than it was to have ridiculous profits. Now we seem to have this squeeze-out-of-a-stone approach that ruins experiences. They push and they push, then act surprised when all the users bail.
I think this is most of the problem: Wall Street thinks tech companies have constantly increasing share price and the executives are keenly aware of that. At some point sanity will set in as more people understand that the industry has matured and it'll be more acceptable to deliver stable results but bubble thinking will drive a lot of bad decisions until then.
> I wonder how much of this is due to being a public company
Private companies want to make money too; this is just how an evergreen OS where users don't pay for updates feeds into MS's desire need for recurring revenue, which isn't a desire unique to publicly-traded firms.
