Companies are going to incrementally keep making their products less and less until they are nothing at all. From JR Leach at off-guardian.org:
A love letter to Wagon Wheels—and a breakup with what they’ve become
Unlimited growth. It’s the logic that says a business making a tidy profit is, somehow, failing—unless next quarter is bigger, wider, taller, louder, forever. Growth without end. As if anything in the known universe behaves like that, beyond mould, death and taxes.
Once upon a time—and by that I mean from the dawn of bartering until fairly recently—you made a thing and, if other humans liked it, they gave you something for it. A shoemaker made shoes. If he sold two pairs in a month, that was a good month. No one turned up at his door to inform him that, because he’d sold two pairs in May, he must sell four in June or be a disgrace to the profession. He didn’t respond by thinning the leather, hollowing the heel and telling customers, with a brave little smile, that it was “the new lightweight range.” He just made good shoes and survived by being good at the thing he was good at.
But that’s not how it works now.
Now, we follow the model of perpetual growth. Profit must increase year by year, embroiling every business in a Highlander scenario where, if everyone follows this pattern through to the bitter end, there can be only one.
Not every business is backed by the printing press or rated too big to fail.
They have to turn a profit by any means necessary.
Rowntree’s Aero bar used to be made with real sugar, chocolate and genuine vanilla extract. Then they changed it to corn syrup solids and vanillin. I don’t know what they did with the chocolate. Tastes lousy and I haven’t eaten one in decades.