Comment by crazygringo
17 hours ago
> 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.
You're comparing being 3 months behind on a supplementary software feature that's tucked among dozens of icons on the toolbar with making a hard decision about pivoting your entire megalithic industrial, research, sales, and distribution infrastructure to a radically new technology.
The discussion you started is about spamming features to see what sticks, as set against making deliberate, selective product decisions as you confidently observe your market.
It's possible that a company that ideologically sets itself against delivering any generative AI features ever might miss where the industry is going over the next 10 or 20 years. But we were never talking about that, were we?
Digital photography started out as a supplementary toy as well. And we are starting to witness a gigantic computational infrastructure pivot with GPU's and NPU's and whatnot. Google and Amazon are literally signing nuclear power plant agreements to power it. AI is a radically new technology.
Do you remember two years ago when ChatGPT came out, and people here on HN were confidently declaring it was the end of Google Search, unless Google proved they could respond immediately? And Google released Gemini less than six months later to demonstrate that Search wasn't going to go the way of Kodak, and it still took people a while to calm down after that?
And the AI revolution is moving a lot faster than the digital photography revolution. We're not talking about "the next 10 or 20 years". You seem to be severely underestimating the power of competition and technological progress, and the ability for it to put you out of business.
You're suggesting the correct approach is "deliberate, selective product decisions as you confidently observe your market." What happens when your deliberation is too slow, your selectivity turns out to be wrong, and your confidence is ill-founded? Well, the company that was willing to experiment with a lot more features is more likely to build the winning features and take over the market while you were busy deliberating.
I'm surprised to be having this conversation on HN, where the start-up ethos reigns supreme. The whole idea of the tech world is to try new things and fail fast, because it's better for everyone in the long run. That's what the big corporations are doing with AI features. Isn't that the kind of thing that tech entrepreneurs are supposed to celebrate?
Startups during their earliest stages are encouraged to throw spaghetti at the wall specifically because they don't yet have a customers to offend. They have nothing to lose from failing fast.
In the 2010's more mature companies explored adopting this same model, especially those that had themselves been founded the decade prior. What came out of it was a lot of spaghetti making a mess all over the walls, and the floors, and the ceiling. There were half-baked ideas everywhere, and a few genuine revolutions, but the quality of pretty much everything tanked.
Optimistically, we now seem to be at the starr of a pendulum swing back from that, but with little time to scrape off all the spaghetti that continues to drag everything down.
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> I'm surprised to be having this conversation on HN, where the start-up ethos reigns supreme.
Many of us are sick to death of the startup ethos. We want tools that work consistently and aren't constantly changing because someone at the company got bored.