Claude Mythos introduces Crack of Doubt for banking customers
For decades, banks have been the ultimate trusted space. We assume they’ve got the fraud stuff handled, mostly because we’re told scams are our fault with social manipulation that happens outside their walls. But Anthropic just dropped a massive rock into that calm pond.
Your Product’s 94% Blind Spot: Is Your Brand Prepared for 50 Years of Liability?
As emerging laws extend your responsibility for decades, passive compliance is no longer enough. Discover how designing the end transforms a half-century of liability into a strategic advantage.
The What, Why, and Where of Sunsetting a Product
Breakups are hard. It takes bravery to end a relationship, but that clear vision is often clouded by the fear of what comes next. In business, this fear leads to a dangerous stagnation.
Are you the sort of person who tolerates the bare minimum? Are you keeping customers on the hook with a less-than-adequate product experience just to avoid a difficult conversation? Or are you trapped in the fallacy that if even one person is still using a service, you are obligated to keep it going?
Tidying up the digital waste of your product offering is essential. Portfolio clarity is a requirement for brand trust, not just a way to save money.
The Right to Leave: Designing Sovereign Endings in an Age of Digital EU Independence.
There is a massive truck hurtling towards US Big Tech, and the European Union is behind the wheel. We are moving beyond simple data protection into a new era of forced digital independence.
This legislation fundamentally increases the requirement for US tech companies to face an ending. It is now up to them whether they want to design one.
The Day the Magic Died: What AI Can Learn from Tommy Cooper
When he fell, the audience didn't rush to help. They roared with laughter. They believed the collapse was part of the act.
Cooper had done something extraordinary. He had nurtured a relationship of belief so resilient that even his death was interpreted as a punchline.
Today, the tech industry is attempting a magic trick of its own with Artificial Intelligence. But unlike Cooper, many businesses are failing to nurture the belief required to sustain the performance. Instead of a story that invites us in, many are selling AI as another technology feature.
The Great Geopatriation: Digital Endings Coming for Millions of Europeans Millions of Europeans to break from Windows
There are over 250 million installations of Microsoft Windows across European businesses and homes. According to Statcounter, the company enjoys a 72% dominance of the desktop operating system market. It has been a mainstay for decades; ever since Windows 95, it has been the preferred choice of PC customers. This means millions of people know nothing other than Windows to run their computers. Could recent changes in politics and policy inspire a world without Windows?
The historical consumer split
This is an extract from The Ends book. It is often useful to look back at history to see the deeper context of todays issues around consumerism and how we got here.
The End of Coral: How did it feel?
The final chapters of the world's warm-water coral reefs are being written, not with a bang, but with the silent, unseen death of marine ecosystems. This loss, predicted for years by climate scientists, has largely gone unremarked by the wider public. For an engineering blog that values data, precision, and critical milestones, this moment demands a critical assessment. How did the era of global coral reefs end? And how did it feel?
Missing the second most certain user case.
The most universal truth for any business is that their customer is alive. This is the most certain user case—so obvious it's never discussed. But what about the second most certain event that every customer, regardless of product or price, will experience? Death.
While companies pour resources into optimising sign-up flows and retention strategies, they systematically fail to plan for the ultimate ending of their customers. This oversight is not just an emotional miss; it creates a massive administrative burden for grieving families and represents a colossal operational failure for businesses.
Bad Churn: Why Your CLV Needs an Ending Multiplier
The CLV method has its origins in a different business landscape, long before climate change had been spotted, or before ethical consumption had gone mass market, or cookies and one click shopping. Now consumers are more concerned about consequences, and businesses have the ability to observe nuanced current behaviour and predict future actions.
We need a multiplier for the CLV that recognises the impact of the end. Adding an Ending Multiplier to the traditional CLV represents the quality of the off-boarding experience.
The Lie of Forever: Why Telecoms Must Stop Fearing the Customer Exit
For years, the telecoms industry has been defined by a forward-only drive. Yet, in all that excitement, a crucial conversation was missing: how would any of this end?
This profound, almost wilful, blindness to the conclusion of the product lifecycle is a problem that continues to plague the telecoms sector today. But it shouldn’t.