Marcus Webb

Tech companies routinely build products they intend to retire. The reason isn't waste. It's control.

When Apple or Oracle buys back its own stock instead of funding research, that's not financial engineering. It's a confession about where growth actually comes from.

Tech companies aren't bad at business. They're playing a different game, and the rules are written in accounting language most investors never bother to read.

Planned obsolescence in tech isn't negligence or short-termism. It's a precise, rational strategy that most companies execute deliberately and well.

The biggest winners in tech didn't satisfy existing demand. They manufactured awareness of a problem, then sold the solution.

The features that keep you online longest aren't accidents of good design. They are the product, and you are the inventory.

Tech companies have repackaged artificial scarcity as exclusivity, and we keep falling for it. The waitlist is not capacity management. It is manufacturing desire.

The Batterygate scandal wasn't a cover-up of planned obsolescence. It was a window into how tech companies make decisions that hurt users while believing they're helping.

Planned obsolescence gets blamed on greed. The real explanation is more structural, and more troubling.

Slack, AWS, Gmail, and dozens of other products succeeded externally because they were forged under the pressure of real internal use. The pattern is not coincidence.

The coding bootcamp industry has a placement problem it refuses to name. The graduates who fail aren't failing to learn syntax. They're failing to learn something the curriculum never teaches.

The simple story is that Apple throttles your old iPhone to sell you a new one. The real story is messier, and more damning.

When VCs fund direct competitors, the conventional explanation is risk management. The real explanation is more interesting and more cold-blooded.

The Kindle wasn't a product. It was a toll booth. Understanding how Amazon built it reveals the playbook every major tech company now runs.

The features generating the most revenue are often the ones companies least want you to understand. Here's the economic logic behind the concealment.

Rubber duck debugging sounds like a programmer's folk remedy. It turns out to be one of the most reliable problem-solving techniques in software, and the reason why tells you something important about how expert cognition actually works.

The quiet suppression of users without their knowledge isn't a bug or an accident. It's a deliberate design choice with a clear business logic.

API complexity isn't a failure of engineering. It's a business decision dressed up as a technical one.