Also explains why German cars look the way they do today. Emphasizing the brand, so everyone can see it.
The Brand Age
71–80 of 403 posts
Re: The Brand Age
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone with $(80,00-250,000) (which is a lot of you) can buy a Nautilus today[1]. This status-through-martyrdom ritual to get it from retail at MSRP is utterly bizarre. [1] https://www.chrono24.com/patekphilippe/nautilus--mod106.htm
Holy shit that's an ugly watch too, looks like something outta chinatown lmao.
Ads for Patek Philippe on the back of The Economist get more and more annoying over time. (e.g. the president writes "How Happy I am to be a Nepo Baby")
Re: The Brand Age
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question is, in this new software world order, how much do brands matter vs what they've done vs network effects. I could have Claude code shit out a Facebook or Twitter clone, or an Uber clone, and have none of the baggage of Cambridge Analytica, being owned by Elon Musk, or Travis kalanick of Greyball and S. Fowler legacy. An Uber driver-turned-dev could easily stand up a competitor and give way more money to t…
> I could have Claude code shit out a Facebook or Twitter clone, or an Uber clone No, you couldn’t. At best you’d turn out a video game simulating Uber. The idea that all of the business is in its software seems to be one Silicon Valley perennially unlearns.
As long as we agree that code generation is capable of creating a video game simulating Uber, we're on the same page. The fact that there's more to a business than a flashy bit of software is exactly my point! The idea that Silicon Valley is one dude who doesn't get it is as old as the valley itself.
Re: The Brand Age
#74I'm struck by the utilitarian mindset of this essay. What Paul so disparagingly refers to as "brand" can also be referred to as "art". People _want_ art, and will indeed pay good money for it. Said differently, people _value_ art enough to differentiate it from "optimal design", and indeed a subset of people will pay top dollar for a suboptimal but artistic design. It is possible to view the fact that capitalist mark…
I think he makes two points:
- This change of what used be a functional object into a brand was done to appeal to one-upmanship (my watch is more expensive than yours) rather than the aesthetic urge which drives appreciation for art. He doesn't blame the watch brands, it may have been the only way they could survive after the triple shock. But..
- If you're an engineer and techie type and are drawn to the complexity and mechanistic elegance of mechanical watches, he's warning you that the problems being worked on in the brand age actually take you away from good functional design which attracted you there in the first place.
Re: The Brand Age
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I could have Claude code shit out a Facebook or Twitter clone, or an Uber clone No, you couldn’t. At best you’d turn out a video game simulating Uber. The idea that all of the business is in its software seems to be one Silicon Valley perennially unlearns.
I've found the newer generation of founders understand that. The issue is they don't use HN anymore. I've noticed a significant tone and demographic shift on the site over the past 2-3 years with more Western Europeans and Midwesterners and fewer Bay Area+NYC users, and fewer decisionmakers or decisionmaking adjacent people using the site. And the deeply technical types who used HN largely shifted to lobste.rs. Karro…
I agree. Where did they go? Blind? Private Slack/discords?
Re: The Brand Age
#76EconTalk from last month on the topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/fi/podcast/seiko-swatch-and-the-s...
Re: The Brand Age
#77" Because at Patek he'd encounter the most extreme brand age phenomenon: artificial scarcity. You can't just buy a Nautilus. You have to spend years proving your loyalty first by buying your way through multiple tiers of other models, and then spend years on a waiting list. " Strange game, the only winning move is not to play. I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?) and, of course, there are lines outside "luxury"…
Actually in many cases it is for social KPI storytelling. I know some wealthy people and at gatherings they love to tell 5-10min long stories of exclusive processes that they followed to gain something exclusive while dropping names and numbers. The processes are easy to understand for the entire social circle (i.e. not technical or business achievements which they can't easily disclose).
"Let's see Paul Allen's card"
Re: The Brand Age
#78Re: The Brand Age
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found the newer generation of founders understand that. The issue is they don't use HN anymore. I've noticed a significant tone and demographic shift on the site over the past 2-3 years with more Western Europeans and Midwesterners and fewer Bay Area+NYC users, and fewer decisionmakers or decisionmaking adjacent people using the site. And the deeply technical types who used HN largely shifted to lobste.rs. Karro…
I agree. Where did they go? Blind? Private Slack/discords?
The younger generation of founders meets in-person and uses iMessage and Instagram. The older generation meets in-person and uses iMessage, Signal, or WhatsApp.
The reality is, most people are in-person now and conversations that were happening on HN because of the pandemic are now being done offline.
Blind is toxic, but at least the users are cynically realistic.
Re: The Brand Age
#80His point of Omega doubling-down on the things that would progressively harder to establish a moat on made me think about what we have been seeing with higher ed. It seems the "smart ones" definitely read the book that making the "education better," in a world where it is mostly free, was a fool's errand, and now the margins that they all compete it stray far, far away from the quality of the schooling. I work in K-1…
I think there are a number of reasons for this, but a couple come to mind. First, pg seems distant from YC now (to those not at office hours, I guess), and rarely publishes new essays, so he's rarely discussed or present in the minds of commenters here. Also, pg has the fortune or misfortune to write in a way that feels like some LLM writing, when he's writing well. I haven't gone back to earlier essays to check this notion, but I think he's going out of his way to break up thoughts into less likely sentence fragments, now, which give his recent writing a choppier, less well-written feel, with standalone sentences like
> But you could recognize one from across the room.
and
> Or maybe not so lucky.
and starting a paragraph with
> For men, at least.