Owners of Spotify's soon-to-be-bricked Car Thing device are begging the company to open-source the gadgets to save some the landfill. Spotify hasn't responded to pleas to salvage the hardware, which was originally intended to connect to car dashboards and auxiliary outlets to enable drivers to listen to and navigate Spotify.
[…]
Car Thing came out to limited subscribers in October 2021 before releasing to the general public in February 2022.
In its Q2 2022 earnings report released in July, Spotify revealed that it stopped making Car Things. In a chat with TechCrunch, it cited "several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues." A Spotify rep also told the publication that the devices would continue to “perform as intended,” but that was apparently a temporary situation.
[…]
Spotify's announcement has sent some Car Thing owners to online forums to share their disappointment with Spotify and beg the company to open-source the device instead of dooming it for recycling centers at best. As of this writing, there are over 50 posts on the Spotify Community forums showing concern about the discontinuation, with many demanding a refund and/or calling for open-sourcing. There are similar discussions happening elsewhere online, like on Reddit, where users have used phrases like "entirely unnacceptable" to describe the news.
A Spotify Community member going by AaronMickDee, for example, said:
"I'd rather not just dispose of the device. I think there is a community that would love the idea of having a device we can customize and use for other uses other than a song playback device.
"Would Spotify be willing to maybe unlock the system and allow users to write/flash 3rd party firmware to the device?"
A Spotify spokesperson declined to answer Ars' questions about why Car Thing isn't being open-sourced and concerns around e-waste and wasted money.
Enshittification
While I’m guessing, the timing of the March 2019 core update, along with the traffic increases to previously-suppressed sites, heavily suggests that Google’s response to the Code Yellow was to roll back changes that were made to maintain the quality of search results.
A few months later in May 2019, Google would roll out a redesign of how ads are shown on the platform on Google’s mobile search, replacing the bright green “ad” label and URL color on ads with a tiny little bolded black note that said “ad,” with the link looking otherwise identical to a regular search link. I guess that's how it started hitting their numbers following the code yellow.
In January 2020, Google would bring this change to the desktop, which The Verge’s Jon Porter would suggest made “Google’s ads look just like search results now.”
Five months later, a little over a year after the Code Yellow debacle, Google would make Prabhakar Raghavan the head of Google Search, with Jerry Dischler taking his place as head of ads. After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.
In recent years, even as services like Spotify and Apple Music have dominated the music market, there’s been a resurgence in vinyl sales as people have seen the benefit of having a physical product: not just because you actually own it and can display it, but because it sounds better too. (It’s not just vinyl either; even CD sales are up.) I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing something similar with video.
There are already suggestions that 4K Blu-rays are filling a similar niche as vinyl for home video, with the backing of prominent directors. Asteroid City director Wes Anderson told The Wrap, “A good Blu-ray is sharp as a tack — and consistent. It always plays exactly right. It does not disappear from a cloud or platform.” Last year, Christopher Nolan put special attention into the Blu-ray release of Oppenheimer and encouraged people who liked the movie to buy it “so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”
The physical disc doesn’t just mean it can never be removed from your digital library, but they also tend to come with bonuses like behind-the-scenes footage and it’s the best way to watch the movie: the visuals and audio will be higher quality than a more compressed version that’s streamed or downloaded. With the flaws in the streaming model becoming increasingly apparent, is physical media in for a resurgence?
Think of every enshittification as being preceded by an argument. Some people say, “We should extract this surplus: it will make our bosses happy, make our shareholders richer, and increase our bonuses.”
When the people on the other side of that argument said, “If we do what you suggest, it will be make our product worse and it will cost us more money than it will make us,” they tend to win the argument.
When all they can say is, “Yes, this will make us more money, but it will make the product worse,” they forever lose the argument.
The elimination of competition – and the ensuÂing capture of regulation – removed the discipline imposed by the fear of customers defecting as the product degraded. The harder it is for users to leave a service, the easier it is for the factions within a company to best their rivals in the debate over whether they should be allowed to make the service worse.
That’s what changed. That’s what’s different. Tech didn’t get worse because techies got worse. Tech got worse because the condition of the exÂternal world made it easier for the worst techies to win arguments.