Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
This is just weird. Why make these changes? Customers don’t want it, the company doesn’t profit and they actually lost money and reputation by doing this and not backtracking. Who is benefiting from this? It looks like a perfect lose-lose situation
Probably the MBA executives. They have bonuses if it works and they have bonuses if it doesn’t work and they leave their contract early. MBAs don’t understand the product-customer relationship it seems.
Too many MBAs and execs are too focused on the shareholder. They forget you have to take care of the customer first. It doesn’t help we have insane institutional shareholders who reward execs for punishing the customer. It’s a big reason Enshittification is such a big problem today.
The only reason why the MBAs and Execs have jobs are because the shareholders want more money.
Customers don’t decide company leadership unless it interferes with shareholder or exec goals.
The system of ownership determining everything for everyone is the problem but good luck getting those in power to give up that ownership complex.
You can blame Dodge (yes, that Dodge) for enshrining the importance of shareholders over customers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.