As a non-photographer, more of a hobby tinkerer type user that has used Adobe products for decades and has never even earned a single dollar off them or their derivatives, the prices are onerous and there's no license that matches my usage. That's my only complaint really. I dabble in all types of media for the fun of it. While I may only use a product occasionally, sometimes not even once a year, on occasion I want to animate, photoshop, edit video, audio, or they have a new app that I want to just tinker with (Firefly, etc). So I wish I could just pay some usage based rate that worked out reasonable on cost because when I look at my last ~10 years or so there's only about 100 hours a year I spend tinkering with these products. I don't think they care about people like me, but I think it's possible that I represent a pretty large potential market.
This is most likely trajectory I fear. It reminds me a lot of Oracle, where they rebrand and reskin products just to change pricing/marketing without adding anything.
Yeah. Combine this with much of Corpos right now using a “burn as many tokens as you need” policy on AI, the incentive is there for them to raise price and find an equilibrium point or at least reduce the bleed.
My thought is similar and I feel the answer is no chance. How many t-shirts and coffee mugs do you need to sell just to cover break even? Why should a customer return? I suppose it could be interesting to watch the AI adjust from it's original stock to something that will generate sales and profit in this specific location.
It’s pure efficiency. I always customize my orders and it’s too many taps on a usually laggy system. I’m also usually ordering for 3, all customized. I can tell a cashier the entire order in less than 20s. And somehow their UI allows them to enter it just as quickly. It’s not a muscle memory thing either, it’s literally the interface and hardware they use runs fast and is perhaps designed with efficiency. The kiosk app is designed for dummies and takes forever to use. I’ve tried it at several places and it’s always my take away. When I use it I literally watch 5+ people place human cashier orders before I can place my order.
I’m not against talking to people for transactions. I’m against being forced to use inefficient machines.
One rule I had with my kids at McDonalds: you take it like they make it. No customizations; they will just fuck it up anyway. If you don't like pickles take them off yourself.
It’s coming. They’ll let Taco Bell work out the kinks. No need to be first mover there when the food’s staying the same and I doubt anyone will undercut them in the meantime.
Idk, they've all been wanting these kiosks to take off for a long while - maybe ~10 years - and it's just a UX problem keeping most people away from them. Given the labor savings at stake and the simple availability of speech prompted data entry, I'd think they'd take it more seriously.
A dumb easy solution is to just create a call center of sorts and allow the same voice interaction human-to-human while the other person enters in your commands quickly and you just pay the kiosk at the end. They could have done this with very little investment in technology. Could improve the drive-thru experience too (my experience is they can't hear anything you say, I'll have to repeat myself 3x minimum, and chances are I won't be able to understand them if they ask me anything either).
When I visit Shake Shack, it's the one place I see that the kiosk is mandatory. But, at least they are iPads and decently designed. It's still very tap heavy and slow to enter simple customizations. The main thing they did right was put 6 of them out, so it's rare you have to wait for one because if you do have to, it's probably a long wait. It's also when one of them will step up to the register and start to help alleviate the line. The worst thing they did, was prompt for a tip at the self-service kiosk before you've seen your food or even found out if anyone is actually working back in the kitchen.
Yes, right. Well McD sure is serious, up to possibly letting customers walk out of restaurants rather than serve them at the registers. They really want a conveyer belt to deliver the food, no human interaction at all if you insist on visiting some of their expensive real estate.
No sooner did I hit post than I had to run. But on my way, I thought with what I wanted to edit my post, which was to clarify the current testing Taco Bell is doing in the drive through. But I assume wherever you do it, once it gets good enough, maybe you can move it into the restaurant. Like you say, labor savings, so they'd have to move it into the restaurant the moment they could get away with it.
I noticed that the Shorts pedaling is causing a major deterioration of the service and it started a few years ago.
At some point I looked too long at a thirst trap and now all I get is OF girls jumping on trampolines and stuff like that, despite spending literal days of time on longer form content for every second I've glanced at that stuff. They just really want me to interact with their Shorts doomscroll. It certainly has the scent of enshitification since Shorts.
No they don’t. They just have to price the product to reflect changing user patterns. When backblaze started, it was simply “we back up all the files on your drive” they didn’t even have a restore feature that was your job when you needed it. Over time they realized some user behavior changed, these Cloud drives where a huge data source they hadn’t priced in, git gave them some problems that they didn’t factor in, etc. The issue is there solution to dealing with it is to exclude it and that means they’re now a half baked solution to many of their users, they should have just changed the pricing and supported the backup solution people need today.
Sorry but unlimited has never meant unrestricted. TOCs always have restrictions. If it were unrestricted it would be used for all kinds of illegal stuff they don’t want on their servers, child pr0n and whatnot. They can’t legally offer a service like this without restrictions as they operate within an existing set of laws.
Unlimited however, they can offer. I don’t see how people get into mental block of thinking something is nefarious when a company offers you unlimited hosting or data. Yes, they know it’s impossible if everyone took full advantage of that. They also know most people won’t and so they don’t have to spend time worrying about it. It’s a simple actuarial exercise to work out the pricing that covers the use of your users.
Back in the early 2000s I ran a web hosting service that was predominantly a LAMP stack shared hosting environment. It had several unlimited plans and they were easy to estimate/price. The only times I had an issue of supporting a heavy user, it would turn out they were doing something unrestricted. Back then, it was usually something pron or mp3 related. So the user would get kicked off for that. I didn’t have any issues with supporting the usage load if it was within TOS. The margins were so high it was almost impossible to find a user that could give me any trouble from an economic standpoint.
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