If you spend your time online, you will notice that your user experience continues to deteriorate.
The website is packed with automatic deployment ads, pop-ups and tracking scripts. Despite the promises of AI generated, customer service chatbots are useless. Social media algorithms support Rage-Bait to keep you scrolling and engaged. Dating apps hide all the good things behind the paywall. Without a monthly subscription, the printer will not work. Oh, and cancel that subscription in less than three times.
This is a backwashing of the internet's shift from user-first experiences to experiences designed to maximize engagement, advertising revenue and subscriptions.
Ed Zitron, CEO of EZPR and host of The Better Offline Podcast, calls it a “corrupted economy.” This is “a nuisance that will be much more mitigated than taking part in the exchange of value, as it is the result of the tech industry that you, the customer, have become obsessed with growth.”
On a recent episode of the Equity Podcast, I spoke to Zitron, who writes a book called “Why Everything Old Work.”
Zitron didn't hold back when explaining the decline in Big Tech. The obsession with growth from a quarter to a quarter said, “They are ugly, expensive, don't work very well, you don't like to use them.” He claimed that many of these dominant players are “fat and lazy” and “overconfident” based on the idea that “it's easier to be with us.”
“You can beat it,” Zitron said. “Everything you can see on the web sucking right now is under threat.”
As Zitron sees, there are many areas where the time for confusion is ripe. The most obvious is social media. He points out, “Using Instagram now is about getting to what you want to fight Meta,” and getting over what Meta wants to see. “And Facebook is even worse,” he lamented.
Combined with the political maneuvering of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, this crude user experience is why they see the flaws of X and Meta and sign up for a platform on a decentralized web.
Bluesky and Mastodon have emerged as popular alternatives to X, with many startups throwing hats in the ring to challenge Instagram and Tiktok. In a distributed space, Bluesky has launched a photo sharing app called Flashes, and Pixelfed is already attracting users. Many Tiktok users are downloading Rednote as the app owned by Baite Dance remains Rimbo.
Enterprise and Productivity Software
Zitron is similarly seeing a huge opportunity, not “great” when it comes to delivering enterprise and productivity like Microsoft 365.
Zitron broadly states about Microsoft: “They don't make great products. They haven't been in a while,” he added, “I think they'll put the game down.” [division] From this complaint. “I really like the Xbox category,” he said. He then added:
But it's not just Microsoft. Zitron claimed that many once-beloved Silicon Valley Darlings, like Microsoft, Salesforce, Dropbox and Zoom, lost their way after its release. The pressure to bring quarterly growth to appease shareholders forces companies to constantly prioritize short-term profits over long-term product quality.
He pointed to Google Docs as an example of the growth of companies overreached, designed to benefit businesses at the cost of users.
“Google Docs was loved for it being really clean and easy to use,” Zitron said. “The problem is that they say they need AI. I have to use Gemini now.”
Zitron is currently calling Adobe “the weakest companies in technology,” calling them “desperate,” and seeking replacements. Potential challengers we saw include Figma, Affinity and Blender.
Generally, Zitron believes that consumers have a role to play in this shift as they cotton to the selfish “lazy” of incumbents.
“Next year, we believe we will be leaving these crappy businesses and seeing real changes in consumers, both in business and elsewhere. And when I say crappy companies, I mean most of the big tech.”
search
Google, in particular, is already facing attacks from many startups, which is no surprise to Zitron's mind. Google search was used to display the best links for queries. Now it surfaces the page of sponsored links that do not answer your questions.
“Google searches are bad now,” he said. Duck Duckgo said he was “obviously making money,” and that if a judge in Google's search antitrust trial forces the company to share the dataset with its competitors, it could potentially rise.
Zitron didn't list all of the other search competitors, but it's worth mentioning some. For example, embarrassment conflicts with chatbot-style searches that answer questions directly in conversational ways, while quoting resources. Diem is a female-centric social search engine with AI chatbots fighting data bias in a world designed for men. In a decentralized space, Marginalia Search boosts obscure, non-profit sites rather than SEO-optimized junk, while OpenSearch is an independent, crawler-based engine.
For users who prioritize searches that are more privacy-focused as well as better search experiences, there is Kagi, a paid private search engine with high quality results and ad-free focus.
There is also Brave Search, a completely independent search index that is Google or Bing-independent. Brave also has a privacy-focused browser that blocks ads and trackers by default.
Zitron believes that email is another area where startups can “undertake.” Email is one of the dominant communication tools, but most inboxes are spam-confused and confused due to clunky UX from giants like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo and more. The same goes for enterprise mail, such as Microsoft Exchange and Google Workspace.
There are plenty of opportunities for confusion here, Zitron said. He says that offerings from Proton, an end-to-end encrypted email service, “can't be used as much as you need it,” but that's not the only game in town (rival services include Tsutanota and Skiff). At the same time, increasingly popular alternatives Superhuman, Hey, and ShortWave are about to rethink their user experience via email.
Build products that don't smoke
Zitron sees opportunities to be confused everywhere, not in a purely digital sense. He also sees the opportunity for startups to take on Amazon's shipping and logistics business by creating a delivery side Shopify by creating a coalition of other companies with small and medium-sized businesses.
Whether they come up with new real estate technology to replace the world's “fat and happy” Jiro, or come up with a better version of a camber that's not bloated with AI products, Zitron is looking for a new take on the venture capital model. He says the VC has long focused on growth at every cost, which has raised too much money and, as a result, created a stuck startup that can't go anywhere.
Zitron's PR business is about attracting attention to startups. Therefore, it is his interest to highlight many of the drawbacks of the big technology in comparison. Still, it was an exciting chat.
If you're looking for a better user experience, or you're working on something to beat the big one, you'll definitely enjoy it. Check out the chat here.