If you spend any amount of time online, you probably noticed that your user experience keeps getting worse.
Websites are waterlogged with autoplay ads, pop-ups, and tracking scripts. Customer service chatbots are useless, despite the promises of generative AI. Social media algorithms boost rage-bait to keep you scrolling and engaged. Dating apps hide all the good ones behind a paywall. Your printer won’t work without a monthly subscription. Oh, and good luck canceling that subscription in three clicks or less.
This is the backwash of the internet’s shift from a user-first experience to one designed to maximize engagement, ad revenue, and subscriptions.
Ed Zitron, CEO of EZPR and host of the Better Offline podcast, calls it the “rot economy,” the result of “a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value.”
In a recent episode of the Equity podcast, I spoke to Zitron — who is writing a book called “Why Everything Stopped Working” — about why the stagnation of major companies creates the perfect opportunity for startups to challenge incumbents across various industries.
Zitron didn’t hold back when describing Big Tech’s decline, criticizing its obsession with quarter-to-quarter growth that leads to subpar products: “They’re ugly, they’re expensive, they don’t work very well, you don’t like using them.” He argued that many of these dominant players have grown “fat and lazy” and “overconfident,” their business models based on the idea that “it’s just easier to stay with us.”
“You can beat that,” Zitron said. “Anything you see on the web that sucks right now is at threat.”
As Zitron sees it, there are numerous areas that are ripe for disruption. One of the most obvious is social media, where he notes that “to use Instagram right now is to fight Meta to get to the things you want” and get past what Meta wants you to see. “And Facebook is even worse,” he laments.
This crummy user experience, combined with the political maneuverings on Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, is why we’re seeing people defect from X and Meta and sign up for platforms on the decentralized web, which is a system of independent, privately owned servers that work together to provide private and secure access to information and services.
Bluesky and Mastodon have emerged as popular alternatives to X, and many startups are throwing their hats in the ring to challenge Instagram and TikTok. In the decentralized space, Bluesky is launching a photo-sharing app called Flashes, and Pixelfed is already attracting users. Many TikTok users have downloaded RedNote as the ByteDance-owned app remains in limbo.
Enterprise and productivity software
Zitron similarly sees massive opportunities when it comes to enterprise and productivity offerings like Microsoft 365 that aren’t “great.”
Zitron said of Microsoft broadly, “They don’t make great products. They haven’t in some time.” Here, he added that he would “maybe put the gaming [division] aside” from this complaint. “I quite like the Xbox division,” he said. Then he added: “But they love laying people off and I’m sure that that place is going to slop soon.”
But it’s not just Microsoft. Zitron argued that many once-beloved Silicon Valley darlings – like Microsoft, Salesforce, Dropbox, and Zoom – lost their way after going public. The pressure to deliver quarter-over-quarter growth to appease shareholders invariably forces companies to prioritize short-term gains over long-term product quality.
He pointed to Google Docs as an example of growing corporate overreach designed to benefit a company at its users’ expense.
“Google Docs was beloved for being this really clean, easy-to-use thing,” Zitron said. “The problem is now it’s telling me that it needs AI. I must use Gemini in it now.”
Zitron called Adobe “the weakest company in tech” at the moment, calling them “desperate” and calling for a replacement. Some potential challengers we’ve seen include Figma, Affinity, and Blender.
Generally, Zitron thinks consumers will have a role to play in this shift as they cotton onto the self-serving “laziness” of incumbents.
“I believe in the next year, we’re going to see a real shift in consumers, both business and otherwise, away from these shitty companies. And when I say shitty companies, I mean most of Big Tech.”
Search
Google in particular is already facing an assault by numerous startups, and deservedly so in Zitron’s mind. Google Search used to surface the best links for your query. Now it surfaces a page of sponsored links that don’t answer your question.
“Google search is bad now,” he said, noting that DuckDuckGo “apparently makes money” and may be able to rise if the judge in Google’s search antitrust trial forces the company to share its datasets with competitors.
Zitron didn’t list all the other search competitors, but it’s worth mentioning a few. Perplexity, for example, is competing with chatbot style search that answers questions directly in a conversational way while citing resources. Diem is a female-focused social search engine with an AI chatbot that’s fighting against data bias in a world designed for men. In the decentralized space, Marginalia Search boosts obscure, non-commercial sites rather than SEO-optimized junk, while OpenSearch is an independent, crawler-based engine.
For users who prioritize not just a better search experience but also a more privacy-focused search, there’s Kagi, a paid, private search engine with a focus on high-quality results and no ads.
There’s also Brave Search, a fully independent search index that doesn’t rely on Google or Bing. Brave also has a privacy-focused browser that blocks ads and trackers by default.
Zitron believes email is another area that a startup could “take on.” While email is one of the dominant communication tools, most of our inboxes are cluttered with spam and disorganized due to clunky UX from giants like Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo. The same is true for enterprise email, like Microsoft Exchange and Google Workspace.
There are plenty of opportunities for disruption here, notes Zitron. He says an offering from the end-to-end encrypted email service Proton “isn’t as usable as it needs to be,” but it’s not the only game in town (rival services include Tutanota and Skiff). At the same time, increasingly popular alternatives Superhuman, Hey, and Shortwave are trying to rethink user experience in email.
Build products that don’t suck
Zitron sees opportunities for disruption everywhere, and not just in a purely digital sense. He also sees an opportunity for startups to take on Amazon’s shipping and logistics business by “creating a coalition of other companies with smaller businesses – a Shopify for the delivery side.”
Whether it’s coming up with a new real estate technology to replace the “fat and happy” Zillows of the world, or a better version of Canva that’s not bloated with AI offerings, Zitron has called for a fresh take on the venture capital model. He says VC has too long focused on growth at all costs, which has created a stranded generation of startups that raised too much money – and have nowhere to go as a result.
Zitron’s PR business is to draw attention to startups, so it’s in his interests to underscore the many shortcomings of Big Tech in comparison. Still, it was an inspiring chat.
If you’re hankering for a better user experience, or you’re working on something to take down the bigs, you’ll definitely enjoy it. Check out our chat here.
