Hey tech folks. Real talk. What companies do you know that seem to mostly avoid sacrificing long-term quality for a fast bottom line?
I'm talking about this tendency people have been noting for decades now, where companies rush for a big feature announcement and build something that barely holds together, and when it doesn't make enough money they rinse and repeat.
Who do you know that doesn't do that, or that does it less?
Please boost; I'd really love to hear broad responses.
@epilanthanomai people do this, but generally not companies. at least, not any bigger than like, five people. at least not in software.
take, for example, Working Copy, a git client for iOS. Working Copy is a paid app, where a purchase lasts forever, but only grants updates for a year. this model works very well, and the software is reliable, and there’s no rush to add new features, because so long as SOMETHING good is released over the course of the year, people will have reason to repurchase. and maybe most people only repurchase once every few years, when the number of features they’re missing out on gets significant. but the incentive is to have return customers, so the quality of the app needs to be consistently high.
this works because Working Copy is developed by one person: Anders Borum. and this is the general trend in the iOS/Mac app ecosystem. apps made by indie developers, paid and free, are consistently high quality and reliable. many are open source and paid thru donations, or subsidized by the developers other employment!
but this does not, and can not, scale up to a large payroll. it simply does not take that many developers to maintain a good app. if it does, you need a different funding model: a nonprofit, like the Blender Foundation, or university support. but no model with a corporate CEO and investors can help you here: no corporate CEO and investors is satisfied with a stable team of five people with steady income. they want numbers to go up. but a stable team of five people with steady income is what produces the best software.
@epilanthanomai the other answer to this question is “infrastructure companies”: web hosts, for example, make their money by being reliable, not by having features. they’re not rushing to deploy anything. but i got the sense you were asking more about consumer tech and less about tech infrastructure.
@Lady Definitely not limiting the question to product companies. Infrastructure is good too, though you might be surprised to hear that I've had pretty varied responses about even those in this thread.
@epilanthanomai anybody developing bespoke enterprise software is going to be looking to minimize change as much as possible or else be out of a job. it’s only with non-bespoke solutions trying to gain new adopters where “flashy new features” looks attractive.
developers of bespoke solutions might still be crunching against deadlines and produce subpar work as a result, but those deadlines are being set by administration (of the enterprise they are building solutions for), not by the technical workers/teams/departments/organizations themselves. which is different. if somebody hires you to build something in five weeks, they get what they pay for. and those somebodies aren’t tech companies, but libraries, hospitals, schools, and government offices.
@epilanthanomai if you connect the dots, what i’m saying here is that good tech is created by small teams for small numbers of clients. tech is in a bad place right now because we have big companies with lots of employees providing vendored solutions, instead of lots of small companies providing highly specific solutions for individual usecases or clients. it is not that we have too many software developers, it’s that they’re all working to build flashy new features for Google instead of working to make the medical charts at the local hospital actually respect patients’ lived names. the former makes money while the latter has no funding.
but as to your question, “what companies”? no companies. all the best tech work is happening in-house at an institution whose main mission is something else. and you never see it unless you work there.