Nike is a useful test case (1) here. Brand was the whole competitive moat for them and once athletic gear commoditized, then management spent five years cutting the things that sustain it: athlete relationships, premium positioning, product development. Each cut looked (somewhat) rational on its own but none of them were, taken together.

(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economi...

EDIT: Nevermind comments are apparently just a pg meta discussion..

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fragmede 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 the drivers simply by not having the overhead that Uber has with lawyers and executive salaries in this age of ChatGPT. Drivers will go to where there's riders and money, and riders will go to where there's drivers and cheaper rides. (and no drivers.) If someone needs an app idea to work on, it's the incumbents, without the suck. Facebook without "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

Because looking at Truth Social and Gab, people do adopt brands as part of their identity; and Uber but for drivers, or Facebook, without the spying, are trivial to make the software side of things on now. The fact that we haven't seen a dozen Uber competitors spring up is a testament to the fact that branding is a helluva moat. It's impossible to put a dollar value on it, but ChatGPT has no moat, except that it's Chat-fucking-GPT. The original chatbot and no matter how good Claude gets, it'll never be the original.

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lionkor 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Also those vibe coded competitors will not make it. Feel free to try though

	▲	JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> those vibe coded competitors will not make it Some of them will. And I suspect the set of markets in which they do will only increase—traditional SWE is probably dying, hard as that is to accept. But the fundamentals of engineering and business are nowhere close to going away. And those are the actually-hard parts of business.

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kridsdale1 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

(I look over to the Coca-Cola Classic on my table that I picked because my taste buds prefer the classic brand)

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stackghost 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your taste buds prefer the flavor, not the brand. If they changed their name to "Caramel Diet Fanta" but kept the recipe identical, you'd still enjoy the taste.

The New Coke brand failed because people didn't like the taste, not the other way around.

	▲	nicole_express 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		New Coke is a very interesting counterpoint to the brand focus, but on the other hand, they did at the time make a very big push of it being "New" Coke. Hard to tell what would've happened if they had just swapped out the formula. I drink Diet Coke, which is basically the same formula that became New Coke with chemical sludge instead of sugar, and it tastes pretty good to my tongue to the point where I drink it over Coke Zero, the one closer to "the real thing".
	▲	organsnyder 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Every time I drink a Coke (or any other soft drink), the brand's baggage (good and bad) is present. Unless you're doing a blind taste test, it's impossible to avoid that.

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JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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fragmede 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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alephnerd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

Karrot_Kream (another longtime HN user) identified this shift as well [0]

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Karrot_Kream

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fragmede 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree. Where did they go? Blind? Private Slack/discords?

	▲	Karrot_Kream an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The Bay Area/NYC and founder adjacent folks I know are mostly on group chats and messaging apps. Fundamentally the signal on this site is too low to be of use in those conversations. It's difficult to discuss decisionmaking in a forum full of random Fortune 100 employee deep in a torrid company hierarchy complaining about what their management hierarchy wants them to do. There's also a tension between the increasing "community building" happening on HN and the Bay Area/NYC crowd. A lot of them have an extant community largely based on in-person relationships. The more HN builds its own community, the more you alienate this set of people. In other words, Slashdotification is happening more and more to HN where a set of very online tech people who don't really make decisions generate most of the chatter on this site.
	▲	alephnerd 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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stackghost 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]