Comment by swatcoder
16 hours ago
> What's wrong with trying out 100 different AI features across your product suite, and then seeing which ones "stick"?
For users? Almost everything is wrong with that.
There are no users looking for wild churn in their user interface, no users crossing their fingers that the feature that stuck for them gets pruned because it didn't hit adoption targets overall, no users hoping for popups and nags interrupting their workflow to promote some new garbage that was rushed out and barely considered.
Users want to know what their tool does, learn how to use it, and get back to their own business. They can welcome compelling new features, of course, but they generally want them to be introduced in a coherent way, they want to be able to rely on the feature being there for as long as their own use of those features persists, and they want to be able to step into and explore these new features on their own pace and without disturbance to their practiced workflow.
There are multiple different types of users.
The users of https://notebooklm.google/ aren't the same as the users of Google Docs.
Think about the other side though -- if the tool you've learned and rely on goes out of business because they didn't innovate fast enough, it's a whole lot worse for you now that you have to learn an entirely new tool.
And I haven't seen any "wild churn" at all -- like I said in another comment, a few informative popups and a magic wand icon in a toolbar? It's not exactly high on the list of disruptions. I can still continue to use my software the exact same way I have been -- it's not replacing workflows.
But it's way worse if the product you rely on gets discontinued.
The presence or absence of some subtle new magic wand icon that shows up in the toolbar is neither making nor breaking anyone's business. And even if it comes to be a compelling feature in my competitor's product, I've got plenty of time to update my product with something comparable. At least if I've done a good job building something useful for my customers in the first place.
Generative ML technologies may dramatically change a lot of our products over time, but there's no great hole they're filling and there's basically no moat besides capital requirements that keeps competitors from catching up with each other as features prove themselves out. They just open a few new doors that people will gradually explore.
Anxiously spamming features simply betrays a lack of confidence in one's own product as it stands, directly frustrates professional users, and soaks up tons capital that almost certainly has other places it could be going.
> The presence or absence of some subtle new magic wand icon that shows up in the toolbar is neither making nor breaking anyone's business.
Sounds like famous last words to me.
The corporate landscape is filled with the corpses of companies that thought they didn't need to rush to adapt to new technologies. That they'd have time to react if something really did take off in the end.
Just think of how Kodak bided its time to see if newfangled digital photography would actually take off and when... and then it was too late.
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No, it's way worse if the product I rely on does as you suggest and keeps adding new features just to see what will stick. I hate that sort of behavior with a passion and it is the sort of thing which will make me never do business with a company again.
Back in the olden days (10 years ago), when you bought software, you could actually keep using it indefinitely. Doesn’t matter if the company went bankrupt, if you like using Logic Pro 7 and it works with your equipment you can kept using it. I know people who only recently moved off of OS 9 - they were using creative software for over 25 years, it did what they needed it to do so they kept using it. I still know at least one person who uses Office for Mac 98 to this day on an iMac G3; it’s their only computer, but it still works and they have backups of their important documents, so why pay money to switch to an unfamiliar computer, OS, software?
This modern idea of “you’ll own nothing and you’ll like it” ruins that of course, but if someone bought CS6 they can still be using it today. If adobe went bankrupt 5 years ago they could still be legally using it today (they’d have to bypass the license checks if the servers go down, which might be illegal in the US, though). If adobe goes bankrupt tomorrow and I have a CC subscription, I can’t legally keep using photoshop after the subscription runs out.
You cannot even work offline in properly licensed CC.
I'm wonder when Adobe implement AI check for export. Then it will be impossible to export "wrong" files. It already started with scans of money, soon it targets CSAM, later politically incorrect topics, hatespeech, disinformations and age verification for nudity.
LLMs aren't profitable. There's no significant threat of a product getting discontinued because it didn't jump high enough over the AI shark.