This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.
I think what the author describes as the culture of Whatever is also a big reason everything kinda sucks now. It’s all run by MBAs who have no relation to the product and have no vision except “line goes up”. They have no incentive to care about the product they’re offering because they couldn’t care less about it.
I went to a conference for college newspaper editors at the University of Georgia in 2000. The goodie bag included a copy of a UGA professor’s book When MBAs Run the Newsroom. And prescient. Now they run everything and have no fucking clue what the business actually does.
Yeah, and with the corporate culture that MBAs bring with them, they also tend to make everything as boring and sterile as possible since any degree of fun and personality could be seen as off-putting to a hypothetical person.
I think what the author describes as the culture of Whatever is also a big reason everything kinda sucks now. It’s all run by MBAs who have no relation to the product and have no vision except “line goes up”. They have no incentive to care about the product they’re offering because they couldn’t care less about it.
I went to a conference for college newspaper editors at the University of Georgia in 2000. The goodie bag included a copy of a UGA professor’s book When MBAs Run the Newsroom. And prescient. Now they run everything and have no fucking clue what the business actually does.
Yeah, and with the corporate culture that MBAs bring with them, they also tend to make everything as boring and sterile as possible since any degree of fun and personality could be seen as off-putting to a hypothetical person.