I really don’t see how you came to that conclusion—that Mac was overpriced and underpowered, and only had the single usb-c port. Neo has better battery life, a better display, a more capable processor, and a much lower price (9 years later no less).
I meant to convey if it was made to today's specifications...
The Macbook 12 inch was super thin, super light weight, was excellently designed (apart from the keyboard fault that I got a replacement for free for). That was a laptop that made the iPad redundant. Which is why it will never comeback.
I only had to buy a new mac because it allowing getting updates. It lasted me 7 years, I coded apps on it with xcode, and it ran the earlier versions of logic pro and final cut fine for small projects.
If they had put that engineering effort into the Neo, then that would have been something. The Neo is not a serious laptop, nor is it an iPad replacement; because most really cant and dont do serious work on a iPad. The iPad will still be an excellent internet browser and streaming screen.
I've been very pleased with my ViewSonic VP2488-4K. A little steep for $550, but if you spend any significant time in front of the screen I think it's very much worth it. I'm planning to buy a second one.
Thought exercise for those in disagreement: why would every company use AI to build their own payroll/ERP/CRM, when just a handful of companies could use AI to build those offerings better?
This is largely how things work now; AI may lower the cost and increase margins, but the economics of build vs buy seem the same.
To avoid CRAZY SaaS charges. I left a comment further down about how the challenge is first getting a reliable stack running underneath whatever ends up being fast-coded. The trend will be more decentralization - I think that'll be AI 2.0. Increasing centralization is AI 1.0.
But if that was a goal, or a marketable feature, SaaS and cloud would have competitors out there selling software with perpetual licenses to be run on premises
Yes, the vendors want subscriptions and cloud and not owning anything, but customers also don't want to hire people to operate the infrastructure required to run this stuff themselves. That's the whole point of SaaS, and why some companies just run entirely on that model and basically have no in-house IT staff
That AI means you can write and run your own payroll system doesn't mean all of a sudden a world of people with zero technical skills can start doing it on their own
...unless they have an agent "IT Guy" who can either do it for them or show them what to do. Perhaps UIs will change and be designed half for a human operator, and half for the IT Guy to copilot with them.
The person with zero technical skills could start learning primitive technology: youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550 - living off the land really is the job for the unemployed. We've done it before! As long as there is a safe place to actually do it and a planet that can support it. Those'll be the problems.
Every company that I’ve worked at has had to do significant additional development work on their instance of salesforce to make it work for them. Like 6-12 months of work with 1-3 people. I don’t know if this is common but in that case maybe going custom might be the way to go. You get something lean, without all the cruft, specifically built for your usecase and nothing more.
Well the answer is because the cost of that software is lower than somebody building the other software.
What happens is that all these SaaS drop in value because it is now realistic to build them internally
Oh sure! My conclusion is that they will drop in value, not disappear.
Basically I expect way smaller companies popping up competing with the big ones and their offering will be priced way lower because their payroll is way smaller.
While there is no competitor, internal tools will pop up now.
I believe that. Companies will build cheap tools today while competitors are spinning up to undercut ADP, Salesforce, and SAP. But what happens tomorrow? There are plenty of examples in IT today where the reasonable option is to outsource in 90% of cases: don’t roll your own auth, don’t host your own email server, don’t build your own data center. I don’t see how AI can change that, when the people who build specialized software also have access to AI.
Another great example is open source. I think PostgreSQL being free and usable by everyone is a more economic outcome than every Fortune 500 company building their own database engine. Payroll, ERP, and CRM fall into the same category of being commodity software in a lot of cases.
My experience is that the folks in charge of spending and making decisions are looking at AI as another means of outsourcing. Payroll, ERPs and CRMs went from commodity software to subscription services and anything that is subscription based is getting scrutinized much more heavily now.
Slack is a good example. When the cost of Slack is an unreasonable amount of your operating costs then it makes sense to clone and maintain. The product is simple, you can basically recreate the main functionality in a sitting. Why would you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for it?
That’s a fine example, but my question then is why does Slack exist? Surely Fortune 500 companies are smart enough to realize that building a slack clone is cheaper, yet they don’t do that.
So now consider AI, perhaps the cost of building has decreased from 100k to 10k. What stops a Slack competitor from also building the product for 10k and reselling it at 10% of the cost of Slack? My point is that I don’t see how AI has changed the value prop.
I do not actually believe that you can trivially vibe code a viable slack replacement. But even if one day we could it wouldn’t mean that Slack as a company would just disappear overnight.
They would hang around serving companies who haven’t got the memo yet, or who are locked in a contract, or where the internal political situation is against such a move. The innertia of a bunch of humans behaving like a bunch of humans would provide a sort of “coyote time” effect where the fundamentals could fall out from under Slack yet the company would keep “floating” for a while.
It is funny how much of your question sounds like the old joke where an economist can’t believe their eyes that a $20 bill is laying on the pavement, because surely if it were so someone would have already picked it up. In a steady state the logic might hold up, but we are not in a steady state.
And that is separate from why do I think it is not realistic to just replace slack with vibe coded alternative: just in my company some people use the web interface, some the ios app and some the android app. To be a viable replacement you would need all 3 platforms supported with all features. That sounds in itself a nightmare. Then figuring out what features my company members really use is an other nightmare. There are some who craft custom emojis all the time, some who integrate all kind of weird apps. We various CI and data pipeline processes integrated with slack reporting. And then comes huddle. Video and voice chat and screen sharing. You can even draw on someone else’s screen with it! IT has their needs to archive things (maybe?) or snoop on certain things. Then comes of course interfacing with single-sign-on. I wouldn’t even volunteer to enumerate all the different features people just at my company depend on, let alone offer to replace it.
Is it the sla and maintenance cost ? As silly as it seems it is important for slack to work reliably, especially in case of court orders and legal retention.
Also Is there not a self hosted open source solution that companies can host ? That’s easier than ai?
There is value in taking a product to market and hardening it, and no one wants to invest in something that requires headcount for cost-savings. They want upside. But if it doesn't require headcount and/or unlocks functions they have to negotiate for, and the AI can keep it online and troubleshoot, that is a different story.
Slack exists in part because ten years ago it was a lot harder for big orgs to make good/modern software.
Mattermost is FOSS. Why aren't companies running their own servers to avoid Slack? Prior to OneDrive and web integration, LibreOffice was 95% as good as MS Office, better than VibeOffice will likely be, and it still failed to gain much traction.
This is the key point. We've already run the experiment where the code is free and all you need to do is host it yourself and people still didn't opt to do that work. I don't see how AI changes the situation.
I don’t doubt it but that doesn’t negate the fact that Slack as a company exists and makes money by selling software. My question is this: AI makes it cheaper to build software, but ADP, SAP, and Salesforce also have access to AI and could make cheaper versions of their products. How does AI change the build vs buy trade off in a way that eliminates economies of scale? My opinion and that of the article is that it doesn’t.
> How does AI change the build vs buy trade off in a way that eliminates economies of scale?
I think a more likely scenario here is that something good and free escapes containment at some point and Slack’s core product just kind of deflates. Not something better than Slack, but something good enough that people don’t care about Slack any more.
I don’t see it as a question of whether you build it or buy it, but a question of the time horizon for selling messaging software as a business strategy. Most business strategies have a finite time horizon. How long can you continue to sell messaging software before there are too many competing solutions available and you stop making money from it?
I don’t think “categorically different” has legs. I work on the operations & hosting side of applications like this. There’s an operations burden to maintain, deploy, and scale web servers. There’s a burden to rolling out new Linux kernel versions to servers. But we still do it! There would be a burden to running your own Slack, just like there is a burden to running your own email, and people will choose to pay for hosted versions or host it themselves.
And then there are companies and organizations who have strong incentives to self-host to make compliance easier.
I guess to provide a counterpoint to my own comment, even I worked for a company that created their own internal social network similar to Facebook (this was 15 years ago).
Of course it sucked and no one used it except executives and VPs. Everyone else did just enough to meet the minimum quarterly engagement metrics right before performance reviews.
2. They did, and then exited the market. Employees gradually migrated off the internal platform.
3. They weren’t in the business of selling software, and didn’t sell their internal messaging platform (which is idiosyncratic and closely integrated with other internal system).
I mean once campfire is full featured free and easy to self host. Completely open source slack replacement.
I imagine it's also infinitely better than anything an in house team could vibe code.
You don't need AI for a cheap slack alternative.
That's why I don't buy any of this.
Companies are not bothering with the free/open alternatives.
Unless the real power of LLMs is making it easy for greg in HR to self host these existing alternatives. But, that a trillion dollar market does not make.
I understand selling the Teensy line is out of your control, but what does “support” mean exactly in this context? Will related materials stay on your site?
I really hope this doesn’t lead to “boycott” of Teensy per se. I completely sympathize with tensions running high but please reconsider for the good of the community.
Documentation yes, but also Adafruit has very active support forums where customers can ask questions which get answered either by the community, or Adafruit employees, or both.
Sorry, I misunderstood Adafruit's position and therefore your question. It's weird that they would stop supporting anything they sold, even if they now want nothing to do with it. (They still have five forums for x0xb0x for pete's sake.) I guess they are trying to make a clean break and want to pour all resources into Freensy.
It’s not just carrying their products. They are the exclusive producer of Teensy boards and are distributing them to many resellers but not to Adafruit.
Okay? That’s entirely their choice though. A supplier can absolutely cut off a reseller for whatever reason they want to, and no explanation is needed from either party. All I’m seeing from both sides is some attempt to “get ahead of” the other’s discourse, which is just resulting in a Streisand effect that makes both look bad to different degrees.
The only winning move is to just shut the f*k up and move on.
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