To the question of "Why isn't there status software?" -- it does exist in many places already. As you pointed out, the value prop for crypto and NFTs is almost exclusively as status symbols. People spend lots of money to be at the top of leaderboards on "free to play" games, and funky avatars and dances in Fortnight.
To the question of "Will someone build a big software company that isn’t a SaaS product?", there are lots of examples in niche industries that are still largely on-prem (e.g., kdb+ for algorithmic trading); but ultimately the "fad" is driven by customers not wanting to manage complex software deployments. SaaS is effectively a way to outsource IT to other firms. I don't think that trend is going to reverse anytime soon, especially with current momentum in public cloud.
Yeah, I mostly agree with you on status crypto, NFTs, apes, whatever. Though I'm not sure those have status other than resale value? Like, if I buy this very fancy hat (https://us.loropiana.com/en/p/man/accessories/hats/baseball-cap-FAN1081), it's worth basically zero dollars in resale value, but is still "cool." If NFTs couldn't be resold, would they be cool? It's more like collectable software than cool software.
On SaaS stuff, I agree for some types of apps. Like, sure, nobody wants to deploy and maintain their ERP or whatever. But for more consumer-y apps (most any productivity tool, notes and to-do lists, analysis software, design software, etc), there aren't really complex deployments. People need apps locally, and they need to share files with each other. That's a lot different than maintaining some backend database that has to run on a rack somewhere.
I’m so curious how you come up with all the links in these articles. Do you know all this stuff? Do you do that with AI help? Is Benn Stancil a real life human?
For better or for worse, this sort of "idea by association" is mostly how I think? A somewhat common pattern is something like this:
- Have some idea, like MKBHD killing products.
- These things remind of something movie scene or line from a song (or in this case, the Emily Dickinson poem)
- You then read the poem (or watch the scene, or whatever), and that creates a sort of theme in my head, where you see other parallels, or other places where the analogy fits.
- So the original idea gets extended through the analogy. The analogy begets the idea, in other words, and not the other way around.
Or even if it's not the central analogy, I'll see things that are sort of related (eg, the Kendrick euphoria video art) and that also extends the idea. So it's not like a write an outline, and then make my "points" and then fill it in with references. It much more that I have a messy idea, and the semi-related references help me understand that idea better (well, "better").
Thanks, I appreciate that. It probably works alright for presentations and blog posts, but less so for conversations, unless you want every other sentence to be interrupted by some tangential thought about an old Eddie Izzard bit.
Yeah, that's the one that people have mentioned the most. Which I definitely agreed with a few years ago, when invites were hard to get and you had to be kind of connected to use it. But now, is it like, "using superhuman shows that you have money and taste, and need to be super efficient in sending emails because you're so busy and important?"
I've been toying with an idea I call "Wear Your Cloud Spend". You get a custom T-shirt that says "My company spent $XXM on [SaaS Product]", and you impress everyone.
I can't find any examples, but I feel like there used to be a decent number of swag shirts that said stuff about how much data they had, which ended up being pretty close to the same thing.
In my realm of scientific software we saw a variety of business models and levels of features and quality accepted by the market.
There were some examples of narrow tools written by grad students to help with their assignments. Some of these were shared freely, others asked for a small donation or a small subscription so the author could keep putting in some effort. Others were open source relying on a community for any maintenance. users often had a pretty good tolerance for glitches, frequent updates, and other hiccups.
At the other end, you had regulatory quality fully validated systems. Tolerance for software glitches would be very low in these scenarios.
Yeah, there are definitely categories of software (finance, healthcare, etc) where the focus seems to be on reliability and durability, which makes sense. In the more general "productivity tool" world, it feels like we've traded those things away for user experience glitter. Which isn't all bad - it's nice to use things that are nice to look at - but definitely seems like a shift.
Boom and Bust, or Two Alternating Extremes, seems to appear rather lot in anything that makes money. First, we have nerds built software in the garage and shared among themselves. Then people figured that this can sell for a lot of profit and invented business license. Then people realize that having the code handed to them is not enough because deploying them is a nightmare. So Salesforce and the successors undercut by showing the users just the UI and invented the subscription model (basically turn customers into perpetual cash cows). Now, it seems we go back to pre-SaaS era. Happy to see how this will play, and what spicy take you will have.
P/s: All the better as a message via Campfire, the non-subscription Slack! Just pay $399, and receive lifetime update!
I have no idea if it'll happen, but "the former fad that has since been replaced by an opposite fad might become the fad again" seems like a decently reliable bet.
Another entertaining and informative column. Thanks for introducing me to Shaboozey by the way. What was that Bugati thing by the way? And how do you find this stuff?
Thanks! Yeah, Shaboozey, just found him too, good stuff. I think I found that Bugatti thing by walking by their store in Manhattan, seeing very crazy stuff in the window, and then going down some internet rabbit hole by looking at all of their ridiculous stuff. Which is probably how I find most of it - I see something or find some link, and then spend way too much time going down rabbit holes about it.
A similar article could be written about geopolitics, democracy, etc, and the corresponding standup-comedy level political speech that keeps the whole charade running.
> Towards the end of the review, MKBHD asked a bigger question about these AI products: “What are we doing here?”1
>> A lot of these tech companies are developing tech kinda backwards. They're delivering such unfinished products, that it actually makes them nearly impossible to review.
> Like, it feels like it used to just be, make the thing, and then put it on sale. Now, it's like, put it on sale, and then deliver the half-baked thing, and then iterate and make it better, and hopefully with enough updates, then it's ready, and it's what we promised way back when we first started selling it. And then this whole period in the middle is a mess.
That, and the "model training". The state and various other political actors run *coordinated* propaganda across the full spectrum of media outlets - this is how the masses are trained, literally, on what "is" "true". Want to know how you can tell this is how it works? Read internet forums, people *will literally cite news articles* as Proof that the contents of the news is True! Like taking candy from babies.
The World and even Reality itself is surprisingly simple if you just sit down and whiteboard out the architecture of it. Even better: while most people wouldn't have the cognitive horsepower to draw such a map, I think most anyone could understand it (though, many wouldn't be able to accept it, and could easily leverage the system to adequately discredit the reveal of How Things Work).
Superhuman sort of is status software? It does also happen to be great productivity software as well, but I feel like there's an element of "look how expensive my email client" is in there as well.
To the question of "Why isn't there status software?" -- it does exist in many places already. As you pointed out, the value prop for crypto and NFTs is almost exclusively as status symbols. People spend lots of money to be at the top of leaderboards on "free to play" games, and funky avatars and dances in Fortnight.
To the question of "Will someone build a big software company that isn’t a SaaS product?", there are lots of examples in niche industries that are still largely on-prem (e.g., kdb+ for algorithmic trading); but ultimately the "fad" is driven by customers not wanting to manage complex software deployments. SaaS is effectively a way to outsource IT to other firms. I don't think that trend is going to reverse anytime soon, especially with current momentum in public cloud.
Yeah, I mostly agree with you on status crypto, NFTs, apes, whatever. Though I'm not sure those have status other than resale value? Like, if I buy this very fancy hat (https://us.loropiana.com/en/p/man/accessories/hats/baseball-cap-FAN1081), it's worth basically zero dollars in resale value, but is still "cool." If NFTs couldn't be resold, would they be cool? It's more like collectable software than cool software.
On SaaS stuff, I agree for some types of apps. Like, sure, nobody wants to deploy and maintain their ERP or whatever. But for more consumer-y apps (most any productivity tool, notes and to-do lists, analysis software, design software, etc), there aren't really complex deployments. People need apps locally, and they need to share files with each other. That's a lot different than maintaining some backend database that has to run on a rack somewhere.
I’m so curious how you come up with all the links in these articles. Do you know all this stuff? Do you do that with AI help? Is Benn Stancil a real life human?
For better or for worse, this sort of "idea by association" is mostly how I think? A somewhat common pattern is something like this:
- Have some idea, like MKBHD killing products.
- These things remind of something movie scene or line from a song (or in this case, the Emily Dickinson poem)
- You then read the poem (or watch the scene, or whatever), and that creates a sort of theme in my head, where you see other parallels, or other places where the analogy fits.
- So the original idea gets extended through the analogy. The analogy begets the idea, in other words, and not the other way around.
Or even if it's not the central analogy, I'll see things that are sort of related (eg, the Kendrick euphoria video art) and that also extends the idea. So it's not like a write an outline, and then make my "points" and then fill it in with references. It much more that I have a messy idea, and the semi-related references help me understand that idea better (well, "better").
Love your style, and I totally get that - you're definitely a "connector" (to draw from a personality category cliche)
Thanks, I appreciate that. It probably works alright for presentations and blog posts, but less so for conversations, unless you want every other sentence to be interrupted by some tangential thought about an old Eddie Izzard bit.
I consider paying superhuman $30/mo for an email client when I could use a free one a status symbol. 😆
Yeah, that's the one that people have mentioned the most. Which I definitely agreed with a few years ago, when invites were hard to get and you had to be kind of connected to use it. But now, is it like, "using superhuman shows that you have money and taste, and need to be super efficient in sending emails because you're so busy and important?"
Ya - it’s a pretty weak symbol compared to a Rolex or something like that
I've been toying with an idea I call "Wear Your Cloud Spend". You get a custom T-shirt that says "My company spent $XXM on [SaaS Product]", and you impress everyone.
I can't find any examples, but I feel like there used to be a decent number of swag shirts that said stuff about how much data they had, which ended up being pretty close to the same thing.
In my realm of scientific software we saw a variety of business models and levels of features and quality accepted by the market.
There were some examples of narrow tools written by grad students to help with their assignments. Some of these were shared freely, others asked for a small donation or a small subscription so the author could keep putting in some effort. Others were open source relying on a community for any maintenance. users often had a pretty good tolerance for glitches, frequent updates, and other hiccups.
At the other end, you had regulatory quality fully validated systems. Tolerance for software glitches would be very low in these scenarios.
Yeah, there are definitely categories of software (finance, healthcare, etc) where the focus seems to be on reliability and durability, which makes sense. In the more general "productivity tool" world, it feels like we've traded those things away for user experience glitter. Which isn't all bad - it's nice to use things that are nice to look at - but definitely seems like a shift.
Boom and Bust, or Two Alternating Extremes, seems to appear rather lot in anything that makes money. First, we have nerds built software in the garage and shared among themselves. Then people figured that this can sell for a lot of profit and invented business license. Then people realize that having the code handed to them is not enough because deploying them is a nightmare. So Salesforce and the successors undercut by showing the users just the UI and invented the subscription model (basically turn customers into perpetual cash cows). Now, it seems we go back to pre-SaaS era. Happy to see how this will play, and what spicy take you will have.
P/s: All the better as a message via Campfire, the non-subscription Slack! Just pay $399, and receive lifetime update!
I have no idea if it'll happen, but "the former fad that has since been replaced by an opposite fad might become the fad again" seems like a decently reliable bet.
Another entertaining and informative column. Thanks for introducing me to Shaboozey by the way. What was that Bugati thing by the way? And how do you find this stuff?
Thanks! Yeah, Shaboozey, just found him too, good stuff. I think I found that Bugatti thing by walking by their store in Manhattan, seeing very crazy stuff in the window, and then going down some internet rabbit hole by looking at all of their ridiculous stuff. Which is probably how I find most of it - I see something or find some link, and then spend way too much time going down rabbit holes about it.
A similar article could be written about geopolitics, democracy, etc, and the corresponding standup-comedy level political speech that keeps the whole charade running.
Wait, I'm not sure I understand the analogy?
> Towards the end of the review, MKBHD asked a bigger question about these AI products: “What are we doing here?”1
>> A lot of these tech companies are developing tech kinda backwards. They're delivering such unfinished products, that it actually makes them nearly impossible to review.
> Like, it feels like it used to just be, make the thing, and then put it on sale. Now, it's like, put it on sale, and then deliver the half-baked thing, and then iterate and make it better, and hopefully with enough updates, then it's ready, and it's what we promised way back when we first started selling it. And then this whole period in the middle is a mess.
That, and the "model training". The state and various other political actors run *coordinated* propaganda across the full spectrum of media outlets - this is how the masses are trained, literally, on what "is" "true". Want to know how you can tell this is how it works? Read internet forums, people *will literally cite news articles* as Proof that the contents of the news is True! Like taking candy from babies.
The World and even Reality itself is surprisingly simple if you just sit down and whiteboard out the architecture of it. Even better: while most people wouldn't have the cognitive horsepower to draw such a map, I think most anyone could understand it (though, many wouldn't be able to accept it, and could easily leverage the system to adequately discredit the reveal of How Things Work).
Superhuman sort of is status software? It does also happen to be great productivity software as well, but I feel like there's an element of "look how expensive my email client" is in there as well.