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AI is a business model stress test

dri.es

281–290 of 361 posts

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#281
This goes way deeper than open source businesses.

Imagine I’m a company just big enough to entertain adopting Salesforce for CRM. It’s a big chunk of money, but our sales can absorb the pain.

With GenAI as an enterprise architect, one of the options I’m now recommending is to create a custom CRM for our business and skip the bloated enterprise SaaS platform.

We can gather CRM requirements fast, build fast, and deliver integrations to our other systems incredibly fast using tools like Claude Code. Our sales people can make feature requests and we can dogfood them in a few days, maybe hours.

GenAI development tools are rapidly changing how I think about enterprise software development.

If your core business is software-based offerings, your moat has been wiped out.

A handful of senior engineers can replicate any SaaS, save licensing costs, and build custom applications that were too risky in the past.

The companies that recognize what is happening and adapt will win.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#282
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. CSS is pleasant to use. I know I find it pleasant to use; and I know there are quite a few frontend developers who do too. I didn't pay much attention to tailwind, until suddenly I realized that it has spread like wildfire and now is everywhere. What drove that growth? Which groups were the first adopters of tailwind; how did they grow; when…

> CSS is pleasant So is SQL. To me. But some otherwise rational people have an irrational dislike of sql. Almost like someone seeking to seal a small bruise with wire mesh because bandaids are hard to rip off. The consequence shows with poorly implemented schema-free nosql and bloated orm tools mixed in with sql. But some folks just like it that way. And most reasons boil down to a combination of (1) a myopic solutio…

Decades of SQL hate eviscerated in one comment! /s

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#283
post #103

> So where does value live now? In what requires showing up, not just specifying. Not what you can specify once, but what requires showing up again and again. Sounds like even more incentive for "managing" problems and creating business models around them instead of solving them.

The flurry machine isn't permanently broken, it's just keeping someone employed.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#284

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

You can’t even have dynamic Classes: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/detecting-classes-in-source-fil... > —- I find it really crazy that they think would be good idea. I wonder how many false positive css stuff is being added given their “trying to match classes”. So if you use random strings like bg-… will add some css. I think it’s ridiculous, but tells that people that use this can’t be very serious about it and won’…

[dead]

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#285
post #27
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know of active work happening on such a license?

I got an "LLM Inference Compensation MIT License (LLM-ICMIT)" A license that is MIT compatible but requires LLM providers to pay after inference, but only restricts online providers, not self-hosted models

That's not MIT-compatible, it's the opposite. MIT-compatible would mean that code under your license could be relicensed to MIT. Similar to how the GPL is not MIT-compatible because you cannot relicense GPL code under MIT.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#286

This goes way deeper than open source businesses. Imagine I’m a company just big enough to entertain adopting Salesforce for CRM. It’s a big chunk of money, but our sales can absorb the pain. With GenAI as an enterprise architect, one of the options I’m now recommending is to create a custom CRM for our business and skip the bloated enterprise SaaS platform. We can gather CRM requirements fast, build fast, and delive…

It isn't that simple. One of the implicit tradeoffs you make buying SaaS is that the overall cost of evolution (development and ongoing maintenance) is subsidized across all of the investment resources and customer base of the vendor. With CRM in particular, ecosystem integration is one of the heaviest buildouts there is because each point solution integration can very significantly in complexity and is also where the combinatoric explosion of misbehavior sets in.

When you decide to pull that in house, you are implicitly burdening yourself with the cost of the buildout as well as ongoing maintenance. True, you could probably knock together an okay v1 of CRM yourself inhouse. But are you really going to get it to and maintain production level quality over time at a lower total cost of ownership? I'm skeptical.

The theoretical party you are describing would probably be better served by simply avoiding Salesforce in favor of a next gen CRM that is both more cost effective and easier to customize. In enterprise contexts, even HubSpot is effectively next gen, but there are also products like Attio et al that have a ton of adoption and strong integration ecosystems (albeit not at the Salesforce level).

When you buy enterprise software from a vendor you are buying more than "just software" you are also hiring a company's services. And the inverse is correct as well, when you choose to build it in house, you are implicitly choosing to hire a team internally to resource all of the services you would've expected that vendor to provide.

Certainly, this tradeoff can still make a lot of sense for some companies. The acid test for that, in my opinion, is whether said company could (and would) actually successfully sell the product they build internally on the open market. If the answer to that is "yes", the prospect of turning a cost center into a profit center can potentially bear significant long term ROI to the company.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying the www consortium should be paying to keep Tailwind development and maintenance going? The css standard is not the same as a usable library of components.

Tailwind is open source. Anyone can contribute to it, including an LLM. If the founder of Tailwind quits on it, others who deem Tailwind valuable enough will continue to maintain it.

You're just parroting what you've heard. The reality of continuing an abandoned project is not that simple.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#288

This goes way deeper than open source businesses. Imagine I’m a company just big enough to entertain adopting Salesforce for CRM. It’s a big chunk of money, but our sales can absorb the pain. With GenAI as an enterprise architect, one of the options I’m now recommending is to create a custom CRM for our business and skip the bloated enterprise SaaS platform. We can gather CRM requirements fast, build fast, and delive…

It isn't that simple. One of the implicit tradeoffs you make buying SaaS is that the overall cost of evolution (development and ongoing maintenance) is subsidized across all of the investment resources and customer base of the vendor. With CRM in particular, ecosystem integration is one of the heaviest buildouts there is because each point solution integration can very significantly in complexity and is also where th…

100%. As an EA you always examine and explain the trade-offs to the business. In many cases that trade-off will remain and buy vs build leans towards buying.

My point is the decision point has moved. Where five years ago there’d be zero discussion of building internally, those discussions are going to be very different.

I believe many tech oriented companies will pull SaaS capabilities inside and as GenAI developer tools improve, the line will keep moving.

And we don’t need SaaS professional services anymore. Claude Code replaces that entire business model.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#289

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

How is this drastically different than a lot of software companies that open source software and then sell support service for monetization?

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as simple as calling it theft, but it is simply theft, plus the other good points you made.

Copying is theft, generating is theft, and it is not even taking anything they had. Future revenue can't be stolen. I think once it becomes infrastructure and widely used knowledge the authors can't claim control anymore. Or shouldn't.

> Future revenue can't be stolen.

This is a big eye-roll but otherwise ya, this is one way to think of it. It's not all about money, though. The people running these companies are just taking, en masse, without credit. This is a basic human desire. Of course there is a discussion of whether or not we should evolve beyond that. It feels incredibly dystopian to me, though.

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