Ask Lemmy

Yeah, they do sometimes and in some situations, usually when you have some major disruption, but the problem is that the disruptor often ends up becoming the enshittifier eventually.

Case in point, look at Google. On a technical level Google genuinely cracked search in a way that no other company did, and made it so good that it became the dominant way to find information online.

They then ambitiously decided to use those resources to try and break into / disrupt several other markets like web browsers, email, office software, mapping software, operating systems, video broadcasting, etc.

During those early years we got a bunch of genuine improvements. Chrome was way better then Internet Explorer, and substantially cleaner and faster then Firefox, and still open source and not developed by ad-focused people.

Maps was way better then MapQuest, Google docs at least gave you an easy and accessible alternative to Word, Gmail was way better then Hotmail with way more storage, the original Chromecast and Chromecast audios were amazing value.

But then companies get entrenched, they start tying every product together, building walls around the garden, and start pulling up the ladder behind them. Then when everyone is thoroughly walled in they start extracting every possible opportunity for money and we're back to enshittification.