Easily explained: when times are tough, delivering growth naturally is hard. Squeezing the customer is the lowest hanging fruit.
Sure, long term reputation is severely damaged, but why would decision makers care? Product owners interests are not aligned with interests of the company itself. Squeeze the customer, get your miniscule growth, call it "unlocking value", get your bonus, slap it onto your resume and move on to the next company. Repeat until retirement.
When times are tough, accept less growth (or sometimes none) so that when times get good again or someone builds a competitor, all your customers don't leave you.
The real big brain move is to be your own competitor, so you extract value from customers either way. If they don't switch, you get to extract value via planned obsolescence and plain old extortion. If they do switch to avoid the extortion, you at least get to keep the price of their new NAS, and you weren't likely to get the extortion money anyway.
America has thousands of food brands but they're all owned by about 6 companies.
Serving the needs of customers (practically the quality of the product) sits down in the list of importance. Sales strategy, marketing, PR, organizational culture, company values, ..., basically the self-serving measures come all before that.
You are not supposed to treat it as a gospel, following every guideline. Instead, it is a collection of ideas presented to you, so that you can decide if you want to use them (or not!) in your day-to-day work.
In general, software development is not a profession where you learn how to do things and do them, occasionally refreshing your skills. It is a perpetual problem solving field (not without its routines), and a continuous journey. Creativity, personal opinions and exchange of ideas play an integral role in this profession.
User account is an interface between a User and a system one interacts with. If you book a flight, a user is created - no way around that. So, what you essentially demand is to NOT provide you with a user interface to interact with the system. Instead, you would resort to interface through online/offline/phone support.
Your demand boils down to having less options to do actions with the business. Options that already exist and come out of the box.
Having an account is not as scary once you realize what it is and what it represents.
> So, what you essentially demand is to NOT provide you with a user interface to interact with the system.
No, I’m requesting, or demanding if you prefer, the choice. An account is a user convenience, not a business necessity. I’m asking why it is reasonable to force customers to create an account to book a flight?
Because a lot of people are still in denial, not believing this is a plausible scenario, just like they were in denial that a large war might break out in eastern Europe "because we don't really do wars anymore".
Worst part is, apparently, lots of politicians at the wheel also believe "it won't come to this".
You should practice your trolling skills. You are being way too obvious. At least, I hope so, because if you actually believe this, then this is something only a professional can help you with.
This has been going on for a while. A year or so ago I remember Tailscale was blocking downloads of their applications from Russian IPs. HTTP 451 means "unavailable for legal reasons" so I imagine this is Tailscale trying to cover its soft spots.
Bladabindi and Redline on two of them. Those were also configured by someone to disable alerts and scheduled scans in Defender. On the third it was something to do with bitcoin / wallet stealing and I don't use bitcoin. I can't remember the name. I just boot them up long enough to know it isn't DOA then eventually wipe them with Linux assuming I even keep the tiny NVME they come with. I started running scans after seeing the mini-PC malware issues in 2023 to let others on Amazon know what I find and to steer very clear of those vendors.
Sometimes they get changed for a silly reason (someone just didn't think of the consequences). Sometimes they get changed because they have to - if I remember correctly it was Asterisk that needed to drop some copyrighted music samples and retagged old versions.
But then you have two different things (with and without copyrighted data) both with the same version. Wouldn't it be better to just remove the bad release, and publish a new one? They are, after all, not the same things, and shouldn't have the same release.
Sure, long term reputation is severely damaged, but why would decision makers care? Product owners interests are not aligned with interests of the company itself. Squeeze the customer, get your miniscule growth, call it "unlocking value", get your bonus, slap it onto your resume and move on to the next company. Repeat until retirement.