A marketing tactic I hate: someone releasing a piece of software with identical functionality to the software it's supposedly better than, with the only difference being that what was previously a plugin is now built-in
Entirely different codebase, incompatible with other stuff, usually a sketchy company behind it, not even any practical benefits from it being built-in, just... the claim of "with built-in X!", that's it
See: Brave, deno, various all-in-one JS build tools that claim to replace Babel...
Of course the reason is that you can't plausibly sell a bundle of two things you didn't make, and so they invent weird shit like this to have a product to sell
Actually more generally, I'm not sure people realize how much *technically worse* everything is just because making it actually good wouldn't result in anything that could be monetized.
And I'm not just talking about the stuff that everybody is familiar with, like DRM schemes.
I'm talking about extremely commonplace design decisions in software development, that many people have just accepted as "this is how software is I guess", or don't even notice, but that really only are that way for reasons of monetization.
Why don't these two pieces of software integrate together? Because they couldn't work out a licensing model that wouldn't allow one company to screw the other, and capitalism is full of vultures.
Why is there a weird centralized service in this supposedly 'decentralized' system? Because if it were truly decentralized, the company developing it wouldn't have a 'point of control' that allows them to charge people for using the system.
Why do I need to do this weird dance with drivers? Because there's some third party developing the drivers, and if they didn't tightly restrict who can distribute the result, they wouldn't be able to charge for it, so you as an end user have to do extra work to download them.
Why is this a whole startup with excess complexity, rather than just a small utility that does one thing well? Because small forgettable utilities are not marketable to a point of VC-level profitability.
And so on, and so forth. *So many* shitty things in technology can be explained by "someone, somewhere along the chain wanted to make money off this, and implementing it right wouldn't have allowed for that".
