--- title: >- The Hype is the Product date: 2025-07-27 13:24:13 modified: 2025-07-27 13:24:13 lang: en authors: rysiek tags: - hype - big-tech - business-models status: published pinned: false --- Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their customers – that is, people and organizations who actually buy their products or pay for access to their services – their core focus. The focus has instead turned towards the stock price. Their real clients, the entities they *really* care about, are the stockholders. Reasons are many, perhaps one of them being that people making decisions tend to own stock options or have bonuses tied to stock performance of the companies they run. This means that for a large, established tech company the product or service it offers does not matter all that much anymore. It needs to be just barely good enough to keep people using it. The easiest way to do this is some form of a monopoly. Monopoly is the business model of Silicon Valley, and [they are not even shy about that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k). ## Monopoly as a business model If you ever tried moving an organization wholesale from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 (or [whatever it is called this week](https://m365maps.com/renames.htm)), you know what I mean. These are two sets of office productivity services; on a basic level their functionality is very similar. Mail, calendar, contacts, document editing, access controls, and so on. And yet you can't even directly share a file from Google Workspace to a person who uses Microsoft 365 (or vice-versa) in a way that would allow them to access it within their own service, using their existing account, without manually exporting and importing the file. > #### Sidenote > > This lack of basic interoperability is not a technical necessity but a business decision. For example, [Open Cloud Mesh](https://wiki.geant.org/display/OCM/Open+Cloud+Mesh) protocol allows for a lot of interoperability between providers of such office productivity services, and is implemented by [Nextcloud](https://nextcloud.com/). > > What this means in practice is that two people with accounts on different independently-run instances of any software implementing this protocol, hosted at two different providers, could not only share, but collaborate on a file – each from their own account, using a familiar interface. Someone confidently using one of the two largest online office suites can quite reasonably feel completely lost when presented with the interface of the other. Interoperability and data portability between them seems like science fiction, to a point where it is genuinely difficult for some people to even understand the concept. ## Barriers to migration What this means in practice is that it does not matter if people using their services [hate them](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5205616/regarding-ms-365) – it only matters that they don't hate them *strongly enough* to want to go through hell of migrating over to some other (or *the* other) provider. With a barrier to migration between providers this high, people using the service can be exploited in all sorts of ways they could not have been otherwise. [Cory Doctorow aptly calls that enshittification](https://scribe.rip/https-pluralistic-net-2024-04-04-teach-me-how-to-shruggie-kagi-caaa88c221f2). At the same time, though, this also makes it really difficult for service providers to compete on quality of the service or its features. It's not enough to have a product that is just *a bit* better than the competition. It has to be *so much better* that it makes it worthwhile for people to go through the hell of migrating over. That's a tough sell – that's kind of the point of creating these barriers in the first place. And yet the line must go up. Somehow, tech companies need to convince investors that their services are really becoming *so much better* – so that they keep paying more and more for company stock. Enter the hype. ## Learning to ride the Gartner cycle Hype, of course, is nothing new. [Gartner even made a graph about it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle), a long time ago. Using hype to sell products barely anyone actually needs for prices that make no sense has a long and storied history – so much so that "tulip mania" has basically become a cliché. Using hype to scam people out of their money outright (instead of selling them something tangible, albeit at an unreasonably inflated price) is also not particularly innovative. Just ask [Elizabeth Holmes](https://www.npr.org/2023/05/30/1178728092/elizabeth-holmes-prison-sentence-theranos-fraud-silicon-valley). What's new here, I think, is large, established companies using hype not to push products or services, but to push their stock. And doing so in unison, pumping the same bubble together. Big Tech paid close attention to the cryptocurrency and NFT bubble. [They](https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/startups/scaling-blockchain-and-nfts-with-google-cloud) [tried](https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/02/11/microsoft-and-enjin-bring-cross-platform-custom-nfts-to-minecraft) [to get](https://about.fb.com/news/2022/06/what-are-nfts-beginners-guide-by-meta/) [in on it](https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2022/03/09/showcase-your-nfts-on-behance), but they mostly failed. Probably the most useful thing that emerged from the whole NFT frenzy was that Twitter's [erstwhile hexagonal profile pictures](https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/single/twitter-removes-nft-profile-picture-support) for NFT holders [made it trivial to block cryptobros](https://github.com/mcclure/NFTBlocker) for a time. Then, Facebook tried to manufacture their own hype bubble with Metaverse, somewhat piggy-backing on NFTs – and even changing the company name ([partially to distract from their culpability in Rohingya genocide](https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series)). Metaverse was [inevitable](https://bigthink.com/the-future/metaverse-dead-inevitable-meta/). Anyone not on the Metaverse [would unavoidably be left behind](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/metaverse-here-stay-how-marketers-can-avoid-being-left-angus-stevens-dhc2c). Mark Zuckerberg bet the shop on that particular hype. [The shop lost 46.5 billion-with-a-b USD](https://fortune.com/2023/10/27/mark-zuckerberg-net-worth-metaverse-losses-46-billion-earnings-stock/) on it. Zuckerberg [took "full responsibility" by firing eleven thousand people](https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-apologizes-meta-layoffs-metaverse-2022-11). Today [Meta is pivoting to – you guessed it – AI](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timbajarin/2025/02/25/metas-strategic-pivot-again/). ## Pivot to AI, whether you like it or not "AI" is not the only hype game in town (Amazon for years tried to hype [drone delivery as the obvious future](https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/22/24137383/amazon-prime-air-drone-delivery-closing-lockeford-california-phoenix-arizona), for example), but it seems almost tailor-made for huge tech monopolists. It requires insane resources and access to unfathomable depths of training data, creating a barrier for any potential newcomers. It is just futuristic enough to sound like magic and get people somewhat excited [even though many of us are so, so bored with tech](https://www.ianbetteridge.com/founder-mode-hackers-and-being-bored-by-tech/) – but at the same time not too out there, so that "Serious People" (i.e. large stockholders and rich investors) can pretend to have intelligent conversations about it. And it is pretty easy to integrate it with existing services (in the end, it's all just text). Since Mark got hooked on spicy autocomplete, Facebook has become [even more of a hell-hole than before](https://techwontsave.us/episode/227_facebook_is_the_zombie_internet_w_jason_koebler). Meta is also pushing LLM-based chatbots down users' throats in [WhatsApp](https://blog.whatsapp.com/talk-to-meta-ai-on-whatsapp), [Instagram](https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/3/24334946/meta-ai-profiles-instagram-facebook-bots), and [soon almost certainly Threads](https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/17/meta-appoints-generative-ai-vp-to-run-threads/). Did anyone who actually uses these platforms ask for that? [No](https://slate.com/technology/2025/04/instagram-meta-ai-taking-over-apps-mark-zuckerberg.html). Is it already causing harm? [Yes](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/18/whatsapp-ai-helper-mistakenly-shares-users-number). Does that matter? Not in the slightest. Google is pushing their LLM-based tools into everything from search to Google Workspaces – [and making users pay for that](https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/15/google-raises-the-price-of-workspace-plans-making-its-ai-features-included-for-free/). You don't want these tools anywhere near your files? Tough luck; you might try to disable them, [you might even succeed](https://support.google.com/gemini/thread/319224306/does-anyone-know-how-to-completely-disable-gemini?hl=en), but you will still be paying for them. [Same with Microsoft](https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/16/24345051/microsoft-365-personal-family-copilot-office-ai-price-rises). ## Hype is the product A lot of people paying for access to these services are definitely not happy. But they're stuck, and they aren't going anywhere. So that's not really important, not something that is considered a serious problem. Enshittification and hype-as-the-product are two sides of the same coin; they are both enabled by barriers to user migration. With such barriers solidly in place, what *is* important is that in the next earnings call stockholders will hear that usage of "AI" across all product categories went up by double-digits and revenue increased. They won't know or care that it's only because somebody flipped a switch and just gave everyone access, while hiking the price, whether they wanted it or not. There is more and more proof these tools are not as useful as they are hyped out to be. LLM-based coding tools [seem to actually hurt programmers' productivity](https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/ai_code_tools_slow_down/). "Hallucinations" are not going away because the only thing these LLMs can do is "hallucinate"; they just sometimes ([about 30% of the time](https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/29/ai_agents_fail_a_lot/), in fact) happen to generate some text that has some connection to reality. They also [keep causing](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/zero-click-ai-data-leak-flaw-uncovered-in-microsoft-365-copilot/) [information security problems](https://www.knostic.ai/blog/file-permissions-copilot) and turn out to be vulnerable in [most hilarious of ways](https://the-decoder.com/cat-attack-on-reasoning-model-shows-how-important-context-engineering-is/). LLM chatbots are also causing real people [real](https://www.papsychotherapy.org/blog/when-the-chatbot-becomes-the-crisis-understanding-ai-induced-psychosis) [harm](https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis). And on top of all that it seems like ["AI" is actually a turn-off for prospective customers](https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-products-ai). So what? Investors [just can't get enough, and that's what counts](https://www.reuters.com/business/us-ai-startups-see-funding-surge-while-more-vc-funds-struggle-raise-data-shows-2025-07-15/) (even as they themselves [get high on their own hype supply](https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health)). In fact, increasingly, hype is the only thing that counts, as larger and larger chunk of investment money is chasing it – to the detriment of everything else that happens not to bolt the hyped tech onto its unrelated but otherwise solid product or service. The bubble grows. The line goes up. Because the hype is the product. And when "AI" loses it's sheen, ["quantum" is already waiting in the wings](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/28/1048355/quantum-computing-has-a-hype-problem/).