[HN Gopher] Commoditize your complements (2002)
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Commoditize your complements (2002)
Author : clomond
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-04-01 06:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.joelonsoftware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.joelonsoftware.com)
| wunderflix wrote:
| I've read about this before. I can't you tell you why, but
| somehow I think there's something about that theory that doesn't
| feel right. I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe someone else
| can?
| bigbob2 wrote:
| At the end he argues that desktop software is not commoditized
| but look at Sublime Text vs VSCode - granted it was probably
| released 15 years after this article came out, but I think
| that's a pretty good example of commoditized/interchangeable
| desktop software.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > " but look at Sublime Text vs VSCode"
|
| This is the HN nerd fallacy - that one counterexample
| disproves an entire business model, as if life is a math
| proof.
|
| In fact, the opposite is true - the existence of multiple
| products in a space indicates there are paying clients - ie.
| a market.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 1. He said software is _hard_ to commoditize, not that it isn
| 't. Google docs commotidizes MS Word for a reasonably large
| audience, but there are a million features of Word that
| google docs doesn't have, and if you use even one of them, it
| falls down.
|
| 2. I don't use VSCode nor Sublime Text, but are they really
| so similar that people switch between them freely?
|
| As a comparison, I use vim. The best vim-emulation layer I've
| ever used is evil-mode on emacs, but even that has some
| hiccups that make it hard for me to switch between them (I
| hate that yanking to the default register on evil-mode also
| yanks to the system clipboard).
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| It's funny, I'm like you with evil-mode/vim but opposite:
| after switching to evil-mode, I discovered that I like some
| of its changes and miss them whenever I use vim. The system
| clipboard integration, in particular, I really like
| (although, I'm pretty sure there's a setting somewhere in
| customize to disable that behavior).
|
| Another is that evil-mode's implementation of `A` works the
| way I'd like it to in visual-line mode while it's just sort
| of annoying in vim
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I will contribute a data point for Sublime and VSCode.
|
| I use Sublime for scripts and small programs and use VSCode
| for larger programs/codebases.
|
| I could use VSCode for everything so I guess they are
| technically interchangeable, but I prefer Sublime.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I guess again coming from the point of view of a vim
| user, I have friends who struggle to use my vim setup
| because I don't have surround.vim (a common plugin)
| installed. They use features in it multiple times per
| minute. For them a complete clone of the vim UI that
| didn't include an equivalent plugin would be
| insufficiently vim-like for them to switch.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Yeah, this is where evil-mode sort of shines: I was able
| to go through my vim configuration feature-by-feature and
| more or less recreate it in my emacs configuration. A
| couple years later, I have a sort of hybrid vim-emacs
| config (smartparens for most cases where I would have
| used surround.vim before) that works really nicely.
| westoncb wrote:
| This matches my usage too, though I'd add that my #1 use
| for Sublime is notes.
|
| For me, VSCode could replace Sublime if they just allowed
| you to open a separate "zen mode" window (not fullscreen,
| but otherwise like VSCode's current zen mode).
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| Well, it may be a case of what Jobs referred to in his quote
| about being able to connect the dots only when looking
| backwards, that in the present moment, one has to hope that the
| dots will connect.
|
| What he refers to as IBM's RedHat strategy may have been their
| motivation, but it's hard to discount the value of a proven,
| growing revenue stream; they may simply have thought "hey,
| revenue, plus some possibilities!" Likewise commoditizing the
| PC peripheral market: I could buy it, if they had made big
| money in that market. The fact they went on to spend
| gazilladollars on OS/2 (which had its moments) and got M$ to
| write it (and gave Gates an opportunity to have his engineers
| learn the 386 in detail while not providing any transferable
| knowledge to IBM, since OS/2 was written in assembler...) makes
| me think Joel was cherry picking.
|
| That said, it is an interesting argument: If you do a thing
| that makes something else desirable AND you can make decent
| margins on the other things, especially if they are consumables
| or have a repeating revenue stream, it may be worth quite a lot
| to do the thing.
|
| I'm not wholly convinced, but I am intrigued.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Joel's articles are very on point.
|
| If they "don't feel right" to you, then it means you're not
| business-savvy yet, and need to learn more.
|
| Note that he was a PM at Microsoft, not a developer, so
| sometimes that is apparent, and there are always exceptions to
| any argument - in fact part of your job as a business person is
| to leverage that.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| My guess is that this is a strategy for dueling giants. You
| look at his examples, it's MS, AOL/Time Warner, Sun, Oracle.
| This is not really a strategy for startups or even successfully
| midsize companies. Those companies are too busy working to make
| money off of their own products. To commoditize your compliment
| you have to have so much extra capacity you can develop a
| product at a quality level of a midsize company and then give
| it away for free.
|
| So it's a very interesting theory, but its also pretty much
| irrelevant for most of us.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I don't see it that way. Take Bic, for example. They
| commoditized the razor handle in order to sell more blades.
| But for that to happen, they didn't need to be in a duel with
| some other giant who made their money selling handles. They
| just needed to decide that they'd make more money selling
| more blades than they would make selling more-expensive
| handles.
| WJW wrote:
| I think this hooks into the "losers game" post from a few
| days back: most startups are still in the phase where they
| are overwhelmingly more likely to die because they fuck up
| than because some competitor manages to outmaneuver them. Big
| tech is profitable and won't die just by itself, so in that
| theater clever tricks like commoditizing your complement
| becomes much more important.
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