7 ms·

I’ve read about this before. I can’t you tell you why, but somehow I think there’s something about that theory that doesn’t feel right. I can’t quite put my fin

I’ve read about this before. I can’t you tell you why, but somehow I think there’s something about that theory that doesn’t feel right. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe someone else can?

bigbob2 5y ago
At the end he argues that desktop software is not commoditized but look at Sublime Text vs VSCode - granted it was probably released 15 years after this article came out, but I think that's a pretty good example of commoditized/interchangeable desktop software.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  1. He said software is hard to commoditize, not that it isn't. Google docs commotidizes MS Word for a reasonably large audience, but there are a million features of Word that google docs doesn't have, and if you use even one of them, it falls down. 2. I don't use VSCode nor Sublime Text, but are they really so similar that people switch between them freely? As a comparison, I use vim. The best vim-emulation layer I've ever used is evil-mode on emacs, but even that has some hiccups that make it hard for me to switch between them (I hate that yanking to the default register on evil-mode also yanks to the system clipboard).
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    I will contribute a data point for Sublime and VSCode. I use Sublime for scripts and small programs and use VSCode for larger programs/codebases. I could use VSCode for everything so I guess they are technically interchangeable, but I prefer Sublime.
    - westoncb 5y ago
      This matches my usage too, though I'd add that my #1 use for Sublime is notes. For me, VSCode could replace Sublime if they just allowed you to open a separate "zen mode" window (not fullscreen, but otherwise like VSCode's current zen mode).
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      I guess again coming from the point of view of a vim user, I have friends who struggle to use my vim setup because I don't have surround.vim (a common plugin) installed. They use features in it multiple times per minute. For them a complete clone of the vim UI that didn't include an equivalent plugin would be insufficiently vim-like for them to switch.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
        Yeah, this is where evil-mode sort of shines: I was able to go through my vim configuration feature-by-feature and more or less recreate it in my emacs configuration. A couple years later, I have a sort of hybrid vim-emacs config (smartparens for most cases where I would have used surround.vim before) that works really nicely.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    It's funny, I'm like you with evil-mode/vim but opposite: after switching to evil-mode, I discovered that I like some of its changes and miss them whenever I use vim. The system clipboard integration, in particular, I really like (although, I'm pretty sure there's a setting somewhere in customize to disable that behavior). Another is that evil-mode's implementation of `A` works the way I'd like it to in visual-line mode while it's just sort of annoying in vim
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      The one thing I love about evil-mode over vim is the smart-case text replace (%s/foo/bar will change Foo to Bar and FOO to BAR and foo to bar). FWIW, ":set cb=unnamed,autoselect" (or "unnamedplus,autoselect") will probably do what you want in vim. Another thing I forgot; running evil-mode in "emacs -nw" disables all setting of the clipboard, even with `"+` while a terminal vim with X11 compiled in will let you still access the clipboard. Kind of a super-niche use, but shrug. I just tried A in visual-line mode and it was confusing. I'd never tried it before though, so never ran into that.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
        The other thing that's really cool in evil-mode is the ability to use emacs-lisp in `:s`. I used this once to get a grid of random numbers: 10i0 <ESC>yy9p ggVG:s/0/\,(random 10)/g
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > " but look at Sublime Text vs VSCode" This is the HN nerd fallacy - that one counterexample disproves an entire business model, as if life is a math proof. In fact, the opposite is true - the existence of multiple products in a space indicates there are paying clients - ie. a market.
PeterWhittaker 5y ago
Well, it may be a case of what Jobs referred to in his quote about being able to connect the dots only when looking backwards, that in the present moment, one has to hope that the dots will connect. What he refers to as IBM's RedHat strategy may have been their motivation, but it's hard to discount the value of a proven, growing revenue stream; they may simply have thought "hey, revenue, plus some possibilities!" Likewise commoditizing the PC peripheral market: I could buy it, if they had made big money in that market. The fact they went on to spend gazilladollars on OS/2 (which had its moments) and got M$ to write it (and gave Gates an opportunity to have his engineers learn the 386 in detail while not providing any transferable knowledge to IBM, since OS/2 was written in assembler...) makes me think Joel was cherry picking. That said, it is an interesting argument: If you do a thing that makes something else desirable AND you can make decent margins on the other things, especially if they are consumables or have a repeating revenue stream, it may be worth quite a lot to do the thing. I'm not wholly convinced, but I am intrigued.
blacktriangle 5y ago
My guess is that this is a strategy for dueling giants. You look at his examples, it's MS, AOL/Time Warner, Sun, Oracle. This is not really a strategy for startups or even successfully midsize companies. Those companies are too busy working to make money off of their own products. To commoditize your compliment you have to have so much extra capacity you can develop a product at a quality level of a midsize company and then give it away for free. So it's a very interesting theory, but its also pretty much irrelevant for most of us.
- WJW 5y ago
  I think this hooks into the "losers game" post from a few days back: most startups are still in the phase where they are overwhelmingly more likely to die because they fuck up than because some competitor manages to outmaneuver them. Big tech is profitable and won't die just by itself, so in that theater clever tricks like commoditizing your complement becomes much more important.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    Startups are a "winner's game", in that the default state is just dead, and if you play without errors you will still end up dead. You have to have some winning move that nobody has thought of before; otherwise, why wouldn't this business already exist? Big companies get to play a loser's game: if they just avoid mistakes, they can continue making obscene profits, because they've figured out a business model that works. The "winner/loser's game" framing is still relevant. A startup is focusing intently on its one winning move and trying to hit it out of the park. A big company only needs to avoid losing moves, and so it often has resources and attention available that it can spend on commoditizing complements.
    - blacktriangle 5y ago
      Startup's are a winners game, but the software aspect of them is very much a losers game. Startup's very very rarely succeed because of high quality programming, most of them are doing very boring things from a software point of view, they just need to not have their software be unusable for long enough to test out their business hypothesis.
redis_mlc 5y ago
Joel's articles are very on point. If they "don’t feel right" to you, then it means you're not business-savvy yet, and need to learn more. Note that he was a PM at Microsoft, not a developer, so sometimes that is apparent, and there are always exceptions to any argument - in fact part of your job as a business person is to leverage that.
jbjbjbjb 5y ago
I think it makes sense in the right conditions. Your product has a complement, that complement’s quantity demanded can be increased (maybe the price could be lowered by removing a monopoly or reducing costs) thereby increasing the demand for your product (your demand curve shifts right). But I guess whether your business can capture any of that increased demand is another story.

bigbob2 5y ago

At the end he argues that desktop software is not commoditized but look at Sublime Text vs VSCode - granted it was probably released 15 years after this article came out, but I think that's a pretty good example of commoditized/interchangeable desktop software.

aidenn0 5y ago
1. He said software is hard to commoditize, not that it isn't. Google docs commotidizes MS Word for a reasonably large audience, but there are a million features of Word that google docs doesn't have, and if you use even one of them, it falls down. 2. I don't use VSCode nor Sublime Text, but are they really so similar that people switch between them freely? As a comparison, I use vim. The best vim-emulation layer I've ever used is evil-mode on emacs, but even that has some hiccups that make it hard for me to switch between them (I hate that yanking to the default register on evil-mode also yanks to the system clipboard).
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  I will contribute a data point for Sublime and VSCode. I use Sublime for scripts and small programs and use VSCode for larger programs/codebases. I could use VSCode for everything so I guess they are technically interchangeable, but I prefer Sublime.
  - westoncb 5y ago
    This matches my usage too, though I'd add that my #1 use for Sublime is notes. For me, VSCode could replace Sublime if they just allowed you to open a separate "zen mode" window (not fullscreen, but otherwise like VSCode's current zen mode).
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    I guess again coming from the point of view of a vim user, I have friends who struggle to use my vim setup because I don't have surround.vim (a common plugin) installed. They use features in it multiple times per minute. For them a complete clone of the vim UI that didn't include an equivalent plugin would be insufficiently vim-like for them to switch.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
      Yeah, this is where evil-mode sort of shines: I was able to go through my vim configuration feature-by-feature and more or less recreate it in my emacs configuration. A couple years later, I have a sort of hybrid vim-emacs config (smartparens for most cases where I would have used surround.vim before) that works really nicely.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  It's funny, I'm like you with evil-mode/vim but opposite: after switching to evil-mode, I discovered that I like some of its changes and miss them whenever I use vim. The system clipboard integration, in particular, I really like (although, I'm pretty sure there's a setting somewhere in customize to disable that behavior). Another is that evil-mode's implementation of `A` works the way I'd like it to in visual-line mode while it's just sort of annoying in vim
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    The one thing I love about evil-mode over vim is the smart-case text replace (%s/foo/bar will change Foo to Bar and FOO to BAR and foo to bar). FWIW, ":set cb=unnamed,autoselect" (or "unnamedplus,autoselect") will probably do what you want in vim. Another thing I forgot; running evil-mode in "emacs -nw" disables all setting of the clipboard, even with `"+` while a terminal vim with X11 compiled in will let you still access the clipboard. Kind of a super-niche use, but shrug. I just tried A in visual-line mode and it was confusing. I'd never tried it before though, so never ran into that.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
      The other thing that's really cool in evil-mode is the ability to use emacs-lisp in `:s`. I used this once to get a grid of random numbers: 10i0 <ESC>yy9p ggVG:s/0/\,(random 10)/g
redis_mlc 5y ago
> " but look at Sublime Text vs VSCode" This is the HN nerd fallacy - that one counterexample disproves an entire business model, as if life is a math proof. In fact, the opposite is true - the existence of multiple products in a space indicates there are paying clients - ie. a market.

PeterWhittaker 5y ago

Well, it may be a case of what Jobs referred to in his quote about being able to connect the dots only when looking backwards, that in the present moment, one has to hope that the dots will connect. What he refers to as IBM's RedHat strategy may have been their motivation, but it's hard to discount the value of a proven, growing revenue stream; they may simply have thought "hey, revenue, plus some possibilities!" Likewise commoditizing the PC peripheral market: I could buy it, if they had made big money in that market. The fact they went on to spend gazilladollars on OS/2 (which had its moments) and got M$ to write it (and gave Gates an opportunity to have his engineers learn the 386 in detail while not providing any transferable knowledge to IBM, since OS/2 was written in assembler...) makes me think Joel was cherry picking. That said, it is an interesting argument: If you do a thing that makes something else desirable AND you can make decent margins on the other things, especially if they are consumables or have a repeating revenue stream, it may be worth quite a lot to do the thing. I'm not wholly convinced, but I am intrigued.

blacktriangle 5y ago

My guess is that this is a strategy for dueling giants. You look at his examples, it's MS, AOL/Time Warner, Sun, Oracle. This is not really a strategy for startups or even successfully midsize companies. Those companies are too busy working to make money off of their own products. To commoditize your compliment you have to have so much extra capacity you can develop a product at a quality level of a midsize company and then give it away for free. So it's a very interesting theory, but its also pretty much irrelevant for most of us.

WJW 5y ago
I think this hooks into the "losers game" post from a few days back: most startups are still in the phase where they are overwhelmingly more likely to die because they fuck up than because some competitor manages to outmaneuver them. Big tech is profitable and won't die just by itself, so in that theater clever tricks like commoditizing your complement becomes much more important.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Startups are a "winner's game", in that the default state is just dead, and if you play without errors you will still end up dead. You have to have some winning move that nobody has thought of before; otherwise, why wouldn't this business already exist? Big companies get to play a loser's game: if they just avoid mistakes, they can continue making obscene profits, because they've figured out a business model that works. The "winner/loser's game" framing is still relevant. A startup is focusing intently on its one winning move and trying to hit it out of the park. A big company only needs to avoid losing moves, and so it often has resources and attention available that it can spend on commoditizing complements.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    Startup's are a winners game, but the software aspect of them is very much a losers game. Startup's very very rarely succeed because of high quality programming, most of them are doing very boring things from a software point of view, they just need to not have their software be unusable for long enough to test out their business hypothesis.

redis_mlc 5y ago

Joel's articles are very on point. If they "don’t feel right" to you, then it means you're not business-savvy yet, and need to learn more. Note that he was a PM at Microsoft, not a developer, so sometimes that is apparent, and there are always exceptions to any argument - in fact part of your job as a business person is to leverage that.

jbjbjbjb 5y ago

I think it makes sense in the right conditions. Your product has a complement, that complement’s quantity demanded can be increased (maybe the price could be lowered by removing a monopoly or reducing costs) thereby increasing the demand for your product (your demand curve shifts right). But I guess whether your business can capture any of that increased demand is another story.