2023, The Year of Self-Sabotage
Has anyone noticed the trend businesses have been on in 2023? There's a LOT of self-sabotage going on in the business world. Throughout my life, and everyone else has their own observations too, once in a while you see a company make a boneheaded decision about their product or service. And once in a while you'll see a decision get made that is bad, but maybe it at least has some justification (even to an anti-capitalist goober like myself). But this year has been nonsensical moves of greed or product/service sabotage that make no sense for longevity or harm what's in the best interest of the consumer.
Activision-Blizzard: The Overwatch debacle, and Diablo Immortal's scummy practices.
Netflix: The account sharing debacle.
Twitter: Maximum divorced loser Elon Musk destroying its functionality and branding and we still call it Twitter.
Reddit: Inspired by Musk's stupidity, the API tools debacle. Shame on the Reddit communities for not knowing how to strike btw (you don't put a time limit on it).
Hollywood: Pulling shows and films from streaming services to declare them as failed products and somehow get a tax write-off for it.
Also Hollywood: Willing to take quarterly losses greater than the annual cost to meet the demands of two striking unions put together.
Unity: Announced in the past day that it will charge developers a fee for installations because greed.
Titan Submersible: "Safety is for losers" says billionaire who proceeds to use his shoddy tech to do a murder-suicide.
Starbucks: Breaking ALL of the labor laws to try and stop unionization. Admittedly a reach to be on this list but the situation (like all the others) is ongoing and can compound.
Embracer: A massive corporate company that bought a bunch of smaller companies. Thought a 2 billion dollar deal with the Saudi government was a sure thing, so they spent 2 billion dollars on stuff. Deal falls through, so they start closing companies they acquired.
That's just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. These aren't business decisions done for the sake of consumers. These are all decisions done to spite consumers or the workers who produce the products and services.
People try to remember years as being the "year of" something. And it's a thing I do too. For me, 2023 is the year of corporate self-sabotage.
