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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think commodity means what you think it means. Protein bars are not indistinguishable from one another, there exists significant differences between various products.
Yes, but. When you’re broke and hungry, those differences become immaterial compared to the protein-bar/no-protein-bar tradeoff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm rather well off and I'll still pay attention to the price of my groceries. Especially luxuries like protein bars. If it's too much, I'll either only get them where they'll cheaper or just outright not buy it. It's nuts that people genuinely believe statements like this.
It’s an aspect of the truth. Tons of people don’t price match and tons of people do. Whats nuts about humans is the quickness of judgement and extremity of statements. Think about this, the man who said that is not actually nuts. And you calling him “nuts” is actually the more ludicrously unrealistic statement.
I do understand and see that there are cases in which one's time preference could be such that it is sensible or necessary to price-match at that granularity even when buying a single unit. However even then there's still other constraints such as cost of transportation & reputation of vendor.
Even today you can often find protein bars or name-brand supplements on Amazon for a slightly lower price (including shipping) than supermarkets, but that comes with the risk of adulterated, expired, or tampered products that not everyone will accept for the sake of slightly lower prices.
In other words, switching costs go to 0, margins collapse. Middle men and people with products that aren't differentiated get hit hardest. A human can't search 10 apps for the best rates / lowest fees but an agent can. Thinking ahead 100 years from now, companies like doordash and uber eats don't exist and are instead protocols agents use to bid for items their user asks for and price discovery happens in real time.
Why would those apps permit access by agents?
It's always been the case that “agents” could watch content with ads, so that the users can watch the same content later, but without ads. The technology never went mainstream, though. I expect agents posing as humans would have a similar whiff of illegality, preventing wide adoption.
Local agents running open weights models won't really work because everybody will train their services against the most popular ones anyway.
Well-written; seems like an expanded and more detailed version of the Twitter essay that made the rounds a couple weeks ago. One thing this piece doesn't contemplate is deflation. Competition will still exist in this world; if friction decreases and renders switching costs lower for a wider variety of industries, while AI efficiencies improve margins, prices in those markets will be competed down to a substantially l…
If I understand this correctly, the whole chain depends on Phase 1 being right, that agentic coding makes SaaS replicable in weeks. We got a live test of that in February when Claude Cowork plugins wiped ~$2T off enterprise software. As I see it the market made a category error though, pricing Salesforce and ServiceNow the same when systems of record and systems of engagement have very different exposure: https://phi…
This only tells you one thing: the market is fully delusional and driven by chemically pure fomo and greed alone. Everyone wants to be part of the next big thing, but no one can tell you what it even is
In other words, switching costs go to 0, margins collapse. Middle men and people with products that aren't differentiated get hit hardest. A human can't search 10 apps for the best rates / lowest fees but an agent can. Thinking ahead 100 years from now, companies like doordash and uber eats don't exist and are instead protocols agents use to bid for items their user asks for and price discovery happens in real time.
Well-written; seems like an expanded and more detailed version of the Twitter essay that made the rounds a couple weeks ago. One thing this piece doesn't contemplate is deflation. Competition will still exist in this world; if friction decreases and renders switching costs lower for a wider variety of industries, while AI efficiencies improve margins, prices in those markets will be competed down to a substantially l…
In other words, switching costs go to 0, margins collapse. Middle men and people with products that aren't differentiated get hit hardest. A human can't search 10 apps for the best rates / lowest fees but an agent can. Thinking ahead 100 years from now, companies like doordash and uber eats don't exist and are instead protocols agents use to bid for items their user asks for and price discovery happens in real time.