I always buy my nails from Home Depot. I’m not addicted to nails. Home Depot does not reasonably think they can get me addicted to nails.
This would then mean that "our expert witness has strong evidence that my client's product area is not 'addictive', so my client could not ever be said to be engineering addiction" would not be a defense any more than "the plan my client came up with to kill their alleged victim could not possibly have worked, so my client can not be charged with attempted murder" is (at least generally, afaik) not a defense.
Does writing a book aims to make people read addictive? Try to design a gym class that makes you feel good about yourself so you will come again?
You still need to define what is addictive
We thereby do not necessarily need a way to know whether reading--either your book or any book--is addictive or not, but only the extent to which you were going out of your way to make it addictive, for which I think it might then be OK to have some specific-yet-contrived definition that is difficult to apply to any specific product but feels like a wrong thing to do (maybe my "exploit human psychology or physiology")?
I don't believe devices are addictive, but that's irrelevant to Satya Nadella believing it and trying to exploit it and thus being a scammer.
It's going to get fuzzy around whether entertaining somebody counts as exploiting their psychology. Obviously it doesn't, but that would rest on reasonably assumed consent.
※ People do get sentenced for attempted fraud, but that's for more blatant things like trying to extract money from an unwitting victim's bank account, rather than just saying "we must figure out how to commit some fraud".
Instead of monthly subscription for self driving or heated seat, it would just cost a few cents a minute.
This would be a strong push to try to destroy public transportation everywhere
So oil companies? Moreover car companies do get more money with more car use. More driving means more parts required, more servicing needed (from their dealership network), and cars that need to be replaced sooner. It's not as instantaneous as uber charging your card every time you do a ride, but I don't see how that makes a material difference.
Microsoft handles more verticality.
Not saying that intended addictiveness is not common, but let's not normalize corporate sociopathy.
I know it's hard to believe that not every organization is sociopathic, because many are (the larger, the more likely to be). But not every one is.
The crime here seems to be that they used a wrong word - would it have been better if they used "snackable", "irresistible", "enthusiast", or "binge-worthy"?
What seemed a bit more relevant was one of the linked 404 articles, concerning CEO's denial and attempts to dismiss the document, before the document was revealed to be co-authored by the head of the strategic project. But even that article sounds more like social media or political mud-slinging in style, rather than journalism:
> In attempting to distance himself from his own company’s executives and strategy documents, Nadella has revealed that he either does not know how to read or does not know what is happening with some of the company’s highest-profile products.
But what I didn't see what a smoking gun that they were truly looking for addictive (like, say, Facebook/Meta has been caught engineering) rather than something they could've described as essential if they weren't using amped-up business bro language. So rage-baiting over the word "addictive" seems to be missing better questions.
edit: VP of a product I had not even heard of; it's no Copilot. I would not assume it was on Nadella's radar.
He's blatantly pretending not to know