I think about enshittification a lot. So many of the products or services that I’ve loved in the past have been adulterated or otherwise stripped back so that they’re a pale shadow of what they used to be. Smaller portions, worse service, everything on subscription – everything you liked about it has gone and it’s been binned off in favour of shareholder value and efficiency.

There’s a good Wikipedia page on it if you’re not familiar, but the TLDR is that everything is getting worse because the people in charge are optimising for all the wrong things.

Profits and efficiency aren’t bad, but when they’re the primary goal and customer experience and product/service quality takes a back seat, this is where you end up. Things get gradually smaller (think pretty much every chocolate bar you used to have vs now), or the service quality declines (airlines – used to have your meal and luggage included in the ticket price and now every single element has been stripped out as an extra to maximise revenue) or you don’t own stuff anymore (Microsoft and Adobe are prime examples – you can’t own something now, you have to cough up a monthly subscription forever).

It’s bloody everywhere, and even in consumer durable goods – I’m looking at you BMW with your subscription payments for your headlight upgrade.

Speaking of stuff you’re supposed to buy once and keep, I’m a bit of a coffee geek and I was pleasantly surprised to find that enshittification can actually be reversed.

Gaggia have made the Classic for years – from 1991 to 2009 it was a cult classic – they were built like tanks, modifiable, and an almost pro-level bit of kit for the home consumer. Then Philips took over, moved the production out of Italy, dropped the quality and removed features. Enshittification in a nutshell.

Weirdly though, they’ve gone back. From 2019 they moved production back into Italy, brought back key features that they’d removed and upped the quality almost back to where it was before. They also openly acknowledged that the community feedback was the driver and hired professionals for testing.

I often advise clients to raise their prices so they’re fairly compensated, and look for efficiencies to increase profitability. But the efficiencies need to be productivity improvements and the removal of waste, not stripping out value. The potential for recurring revenue makes it obvious why subscriptions and unbundled services are attractive to firms but there’s a tipping point where these approaches become self defeating and erode trust and customer loyalty.

Enshittification isn’t inevitable, but reversing it can take a bit of humility and the patience to talk to your customers to find out what they really want and need. Take a longer-term view. Don’t be a dick.

 nathan@nbstrategy.co.uk.