That doesn’t explain why japanese manufacturers who used to make sports cars in the 90s don’t anymore. It’s a mixture of enthusiasm and conspicuous consumption. Most enthusiasts love 90s japanese cars, but the average person sees an old mazda and recoils. But put an old ferrari in front of anyone and they have a completely different reaction.
Are you saying nobody will recognize old NSX as something special? R34?
Stylish mid-engine cars like the NSX look exotic because they remind people of Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
The average person who doesn't know much about cars will think a second generation MR2 is more exotic than it is. Toyota probably wouldn't make their top three brand guesses. The R34 GT-R will thrill every car enthusiast (and probably everyone who had a Playstation around the turn of the millennium), but most people won't give it a second look.
For any given thing or category of thing , a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing , but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing . For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into car…
This is the cycle I keep seeing: Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by enthusiasts. They’re opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but exciting. Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to a broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics rule decisions. Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The product’s no longer for them. So a new product comes out, started…
right, all that and increasing regulation and enforcement, ( SAFTEY SaFTEY SaFETy, agggghhhhh)
marginalises, and criminalises anyone looking for
something out on the edge
and the edge gets crazyer.....think , the street raceing/drifting sceen, where, somebody gona die
and nobody much cares, it's way too fucked up too even make a movie on
the real mofo's and mofo'ets, are working as "contractors", anything goes, again...no movie's or branding possible
at the other end are hard core solder iron in hand
hackers, ocd'ing on PWNE'ing everything in sight
And with my own fucking eyes, I have seen amish boys in town, whipping there horses into a frenzy as they drag race there buggys down main street, not making a movie on that either, cant brand it, it's all thats left.
The market is starving for something authentic, but, every single thing is stolen, branded, comodified, and wrung dry as fast as you can spit
so we get small legions of people who have fetishised things like listening to white noise
For any given thing or category of thing , a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing , but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing . For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into car…
This is the cycle I keep seeing: Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by enthusiasts. They’re opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but exciting. Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to a broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics rule decisions. Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The product’s no longer for them. So a new product comes out, started…
maybe just maybe that's just how things life do, like I mean we seeing it on every single thing and not just tech industry
All of the examples listed have something in common: they are services for accessing content you don't own. So it is in the provider's interest to find ways to satisfy you with less and/or cheaper content. The Netflix changes aren't attempts to make their product better. They are attempts to save money by obscuring the amount and/or quality of available content. By contrast, if you buy BluRays from one company and Bl…
> It is therefore in the provider's interest to make you satisfied with less and/or cheaper content If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd think that all these "content companies" are colluding in a mass "Taste Removal" campaign, deliberately getting users used to bland, vanilla, generic "content" so they can one day just shove AI slop at us all day and only people who were alive in the 90s would remember when movies an…
Luxury watches are a good analogy too. A $5 watch from the gas station will give you the time just fine but there’s a market for watches costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You don't even need a watch. Smartphones can tell you time (you can configure to show times for many timezones) yet there is a market for watches (luxury or normal)
A watch is more convenient. I don’t need to take my phone out of my pocket to see the time, I just look at my wrist.
To simplify: 1. Innovate. 2. Exploit. You start by innovating a "fast horse". This gains you early adopters who pull in a larger audience. A horse can only be so fast, so continued innovation might lead to something more like a car. This will only cause you to bleed users. Stick to the horse. Instead of continuing to innovate endlessly, you switch to exploitation. Fire the visionaries. They're just a waste of payroll…
Porsche is easy to replace only if you bought it as just another fast car. If you bought it for the design, the legacy, or what the brand means to you, it’s not so easy. Netflix has their content as their moat. Even if someone today builds a better version of what Netflix used to be, it wouldn't matter. They won’t have the rights and licenses to the shows and movies. That’s what keeps people from switching. Porsche h…
>Netflix has their content as their moat.
Only Netflix-produced shows apply here. Before Netflix started producing content they had *no moat*.
That's the big problem with media streaming - the content owners have all the leverage. Any profit you make they can see and simply increase licensing costs to transfer to them. If you don't want to pay they can (and will, and have done) start their own competitor since the technology isn't a moat - content ownership is.
Yea, iTunes (renamed Apple Music) is getting bad. The only thing I care about is what I've cared about since 2000: Playing a bunch of MP3 files in my collection. That functionality is now relegated to "third tab from the left," shoved aside behind a glass case like a relic from a former era.
Worse yet it's the only effective way to sync music to the iphone over a wired cable. I can tell they've abandoned their USB sync software because of how annoying the dialogs are when you plug your phone in and don't authenticate to start it, additionally that thay've (likely intentionally to push I-cloud) never added automatic usb photo sync from phone to computer. This probably all originated from when Apple shifte…
The iPhone (and previously iPod), from day one, could never simply be mounted as an external USB (or networked) file system. You always had to do the ridiculous "sync" song and dance and use their proprietary software, instead of just copying files using the OS like every other external storage device. Maddening.
I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil. They were one of the first to focus on being digital-first and allowed opening an account without going to a branch etc. They grew fast and became one of the largest banks in the country and generally considered pretty solid. I've been banking there for like a decade. Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". This goddamn super app has a T…
I believe the "Peter principle" [1] also holds for companies. A company grows until it eventually outlives its mission and loses focus.
For any given thing or category of thing , a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing , but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing . For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into car…
This is the cycle I keep seeing: Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by enthusiasts. They’re opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but exciting. Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to a broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics rule decisions. Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The product’s no longer for them. So a new product comes out, started…
Since more of our culture is in online, advertising-dominated spaces -- the forces of capital have a lot of incentive to ensure smooth growth straight to the sociopath phase.
Maybe the key is just accepting the cycle of it all and ensuring there's always cool new places for creative/enthusiastic people to do their thing.
All of the examples listed have something in common: they are services for accessing content you don't own. So it is in the provider's interest to find ways to satisfy you with less and/or cheaper content. The Netflix changes aren't attempts to make their product better. They are attempts to save money by obscuring the amount and/or quality of available content. By contrast, if you buy BluRays from one company and Bl…
And the Blurays show ads for the first company's other products.