>How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes?
This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package, etc is hinging on "delivering impact" (ie: doing the flashy stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&D team took a risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not ship it because it didn't work out.
We used to treat macOS and Windows like direct competitors. They used to channel their efforts into competing for market share and routing one another from weak customer-bases. For a while, they did give us better operating systems.
Today, both software products are treated like monopolies. macOS is satisfied being an insular underdog, and Microsoft has no motivation to compete if Apple won't get off their ass.
Problem is that “the same” isn’t good enough. To get a promotion, you’d need to somehow prove that your specific change was so good that more customers are happy now than before.
To prove that, you need some data to compare before/after. Hm, how about how much time people send in the software? Seems like a decent proxy. Well, plenty of people are very unhappily addicted to social media. and yet that’s what companies and investors frequently look at.
It’s very hard to come up with an incentive where just keeping things the same is acceptable. I mean it’s basically an admission that you as a company cannot innovate or invent better ways for people to interact with a computer.
This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package, etc is hinging on "delivering impact" (ie: doing the flashy stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&D team took a risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not ship it because it didn't work out.