Tech’s failed promises: Streaming is now as expensive and confusing as cable TV. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud isn’t cheap anymore.

• The technology industry has recently been looking for profits.
• To that end, some tech companies have increased prices.
• The result: The supposedly revolutionary services look a lot like their predecessors.

Sooner or later, everything old is new.

We may be at this point in technology where supposedly revolutionary products are becoming eerily similar to the previous products they were supposed to defeat.

Let’s stream the video. In search of better profits, Netflix, Disney and other providers have increased prices. The different packages are now as frustratingly confusing as cables, and they essentially cost the same. Somehow, we are also paying to watch ads. How did that happen?

Amazon Prime Video costs $9 a month and has no ads. Well, except when “Thursday Night Football” is on the air. Then there are countless ads. And Amazon is discussing an ad-supported version of its Prime Video service, The Wall Street Journal reported. That won’t be free, I can assure you.

According to the company, Paramount+ with Showtime costs $12 a month, but the live TV portion has commercials and some other programming includes “brief commercial breaks.” Translation: advertising.

Streaming is supposed to be better And cheaper price. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. This NFL season, as in years past, I’ll be recording OTA linear TV games with a TiVo box from around 2014. I’ll be watching hours of games every weekend for free, and I won’t watch ads. Streaming can’t match that.

You can still stream without ads, but the costs for this are getting higher and the packages are so complicated that it’s becoming as bad as cable – streaming technology is supposed to improve dramatically.

The Financial Times recently reported that a range of top US streaming services will cost $87 this fall, compared with $73 a year ago. The report says the average cable TV package is $83/month.

A 3-mile Uber ride costs $51.69

A similar shift is happening in ride-hailing. Uber is pushing for profitability and did so, by one measure, in its most recent quarter. Lyft is trying its best to keep up. How do they do this? Raising prices is one way.

Wired editor-in-chief Steven Levy recently took a 2.95 mile Uber ride from downtown New York to the West Side to meet Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. When asked to estimate the cost of the trip, Khosrowshahi gave a figure of $20. Turns out it was less than half the actual price of $51.69, incl tip the driver.

“Oh my God. Wow,” the CEO said when he learned the cost.

I recently took a Lyft from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to a house in the city. It costs $66.69 including driver tip. To check, I called a taxi for the return trip. Same distance and the taxi was stuck in traffic longer. Cost is $70 with tip. So it’s basically the same.

And you can now order a taxi using an app that shows its location, just like Uber and Lyft. So what is the revolutionary benefit here? The original vision was car sharing, where anyone could pick up someone else. Those groundbreaking gains have faded due to regulations, disputes with drivers over pay and a recent push to boost profits.

The cloud promise is being broken

Finally, there’s the cloud, which promises cheaper and more secure computing for companies. There are huge benefits to flexibility here: You can turn your rented computing power on and off quickly, depending on your needs. That’s real progress.

The other main benefits – price and security – have seemed more shaky lately.

Salesforce, the leading provider of cloud marketing software, is raising prices this month. CIO Magazine reports the cost of the Microsoft 365 cloud productivity suite is also rising, along with some cloud services Slack and Adobe.

AWS is set to start charging customers for IPv4 addresses, a key internet protocol. Even before this decision, AWS costs had become a major issue in corporate boardrooms.

As a rapidly growing startup, Snap invested in the cloud and decided not to build its own infrastructure. In about five years since its IPO, the company has spent about $3 billion on cloud services from Google and AWS. These costs are the second largest expense at Snap, after employees.

“Even though the cloud clearly delivers on its promises early During a company’s journey, the pressure on profit margins can begin to outweigh the benefits, as the company scales and growth slows,” venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote in a post. posted on blog. – the long-term cost impact of the cloud.”

Some companies, such as Dropbox, have even moved the majority of their IT workloads off the public cloud, saving millions of dollars, the VC firm said.

What about security? Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, began a pilot program in which thousands of its employees were limited to using work computers that were not connected to the Internet, CNBC reported.

Reason: Google is trying to reduce the risk of cyberattacks. If employees have computers disconnected from the Internet, hackers cannot compromise these devices and gain access to sensitive user data and software code.

So are internet-connected cloud services good for everyone except Google? Not a great cloud sales pitch.