Thread

1. tangled · 1790614262 · focus · HN ↗

   Each to their own, and the market will decide in the end? If a company is going to (implicitly or explicitly) incentivize everyone to directly ship Claude’s output straight to production, and prioritize features above everything else, that’s a choice. Providing that I have a long enough runway, I’d love to have this company as my competitor? Yeah, year 1 will suck, because they’ll pull ahead, but if I can stay in the game until years 2 and 3…

   Aside: this reminds me of running a “negative split” in a long distance race, where you aim to run the second half faster than the first. It’s very hard to do this because you have to be willing to let everyone else in your pace group pull waaay ahead, and running above race pace in the beginning feels “free” with all of the adrenaline. But if you do manage to stay disciplined, it’s a fantastic feeling to reach half-way with gas in the tank, and then start to reel in all those runners who sped by in the beginning.

   1. senderista · 1790615210 · focus · HN ↗

      I don't think that's how business works, unfortunately. Customer adoption is pretty sticky.

      1. tangled · 1790616579 · focus · HN ↗

         Yes, customers are sticky, but every customer has their limit.

         And of course, this is very much dependent on the switching costs. Which sucks, because tech companies are great at making this as high as possible; the EU is trying to do something about this with their data portability legislation.

         Anecdote: I worked at a company providing infrastructure as service. We lost some bids the first time around, likely for a variety of reasons (price, features, ...). And, some customers came "back" to us after using our competitors' offerings and being burned by their reliability. Yes, switching costs were real, but the pain of losing their customers was even higher.

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