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The Brand Age

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Brand Age

#281

Post by watwut »

Traster wrote: post #97

>That's not why brand age watches look strange. Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it's not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things. The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it's g…

> They look beautiful.

I dunno there. I think that Paul Graham does not know much about what he talks about ... but these watches are not beautiful. I give you that there was care and intention put into them, but they are just ugly as a result.

And I did went through period of trying to find cool good looking old school watch. For some reason, the current watch style is ranging between "meh" and "ugly".

Re: The Brand Age

#282

Post by yread »

> Of course they don't call them golden ages as they're happening. "Golden age" is a term people use later, after they're over. That doesn't mean that golden ages aren't real, but rather that their participants take them for granted at the time. They don't know how good they have it. But while it's usually a mistake to take one's good fortune for granted, it's not in this case. What a golden age feels like, at the time, is just that smart people are working hard on interesting problems and getting results.

Is he talking about software development here? Are we going to call the pre-LLM era the golden age where relatively limited set of individuals had to be paid a lot to craft artisanal "code" which with LLMs became super cheap?

Re: The Brand Age

#283

Post by rixrax »

NinjaTrance wrote: post #58

" When our time traveler peered into the windows of these shops, the first thing he'd notice was how large all the watches were ." My only question about this entire essay is... where did this time traveler came from??? "Our" time traveler was never mentioned until this line.

Although PG isn't wrong here, people also have larger wrists nowadays that are able to comfortably support larger watches compared to ~50 years a go, never mind at the 1940s or 1950s.

Re: The Brand Age

#284

Post by pu_pe »

iamwil wrote: post #134

I kept thinking that he'd eventually compare it to writing software by hand, and how we're at the end of one golden age. But he never did. So I wonder what the impetus for the essay was.

There was even a post on HN yesterday making a similar comparison of LLMs and the impact of quartz in watchmaking.

I think the comparison is warranted, and human-crafted code will perhaps become a brand differentiator in the future too.

Re: The Brand Age

#285

Post by OJFord »

eucyclos wrote: post #255
titanomachy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s probably also too rich for fancy watches to actually be a useful signal of wealth amongst his peers.

I had a coworker who became nouveau riche a while back- he made fuck you money day trading during the roaringkitty debacle - and one interesting thing he said about the experience was that he learned certain luxury goods, such as high end watches, don't depreciate. Like gold jewelry one can usually resell them for cost plus inflation. As such, his logic was that a fancy watch is essentially free while a cheap watch c…

I don't think that's really any more true of watches and gold jewellery than it is cars - which is to say it's true of some models, or over time and especially what comes to be considered a classic.

Maybe he meant second-hand though? If someone else has already taken the 'used' depreciation on a watch, the 'art' added value on the gold price, then yes I think it's probably fair to say they hold their residual value better than a lot of things that continue to depreciate.

Re: The Brand Age

#287

Post by penetrarthur »

> So what happened to the Swiss watch industry is not merely an interesting outlier. It's very much a story of our times.

I am not saying it is, but it sounds like the first paragraph of every Gemini deep research.

Re: The Brand Age

#288

Post by manbitesdog »

benrutter wrote: post #274

I liked reading this essay, but, I get the same vibe as a lot of PG essays. Which is, great writing and really intelligent thinking on an interesting subject, but without really being aware of ther stuff people have previously said/thought on the topic. For instance: > Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. I think, for better and worse, brands are a lot more than that. Bran…

There is a fantastic book on this topic called "By Design : Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV" that cover the inception of modern brands. It's a very similar story to what happened to watches. The industrial revolution made quality clothing accesible for everyone, so the cloth appearance no longer was a clear indicative of status, so brands started placing their emblems on the outside of the fabric inside of the inside. At the time it was seen as gross, obvious and bad taste. Guess we had a century to normalize it.

Re: The Brand Age

#289

Post by elevatortrim »

pnexk wrote: post #204
elevatortrim wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Following his x account and posts, intellectuality in PG’s content has gone massively downhill (starting from slightly earlier than his recent rants about ‘wokeness’). Once one of my favourite writers is really hard to read now. It feels to me like he is so overconfident now that he thinks he gets it in any topic, even on the ones he has very little understanding of.

I’d wish for a more pointed rebuttal than merely a post complaining that the writer now sucks on here. It seems substantial to a degree of a post to me at least even if not whole in its conclusions.

Fair enough.

This particular article, I would say compherensive, but lacking substance.

The very promise of this article, that people primarily paying for brand name is simply wrong and it does not take too much time to spend in watch circles to know this.

What people pay is not performance/features/value, obviously. But the prime factor is also not the brand name. With the exception of Rolex, practically nobody knows if your watch costed $100 or $100,000.

What people pay for is artistry, reliability, and level-of-polish. These all have a cost that justify the price of the watch. Nobody pays $10,000 for a watch that could be produced for $100 just because of its brand name.

Re: The Brand Age

#290

Post by busssard »

yread wrote: post #282

> Of course they don't call them golden ages as they're happening. "Golden age" is a term people use later, after they're over. That doesn't mean that golden ages aren't real, but rather that their participants take them for granted at the time. They don't know how good they have it. But while it's usually a mistake to take one's good fortune for granted, it's not in this case. What a golden age feels like, at the ti…

i love the analogy. the golden age of the web was before javascript, when only people who knew how to code html were able to make websites.

however things come in cycles, so who knows maybe the next will come by

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