“there was a model that worked ok, and there weren’t enough businesses savvy people who understood enough of the details to really scale the DSO model.”
This applies to a lot of the enshittification of the world. There used to be tons of small/family businesses, where “successful” for the owner was defined as “make a decent living, by working harder than average”. There was tons of value left on the table (or rather, lots of unmeasured surplus went to consumers). When things started getting moneyballed—optimized financially and reframed in terms of capital and returns, that surplus got squeezed out.
This applies to a lot of the enshittification of the world. There used to be tons of small/family businesses, where “successful” for the owner was defined as “make a decent living, by working harder than average”. There was tons of value left on the table (or rather, lots of unmeasured surplus went to consumers). When things started getting moneyballed—optimized financially and reframed in terms of capital and returns, that surplus got squeezed out.