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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 articl

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.

aidenn0 6y ago
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).
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  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.
  - westoncb 6y ago
    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).
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  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
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    The one thing I love about evil-mode over vim is the smart-case text replace (%s/foo/bar will change Foo to Bar and FOO to BAR and foo to bar). FWIW, ":set cb=unnamed,autoselect" (or "unnamedplus,autoselect") will probably do what you want in vim. Another thing I forgot; running evil-mode in "emacs -nw" disables all setting of the clipboard, even with `"+` while a terminal vim with X11 compiled in will let you still access the clipboard. Kind of a super-niche use, but shrug. I just tried A in visual-line mode and it was confusing. I'd never tried it before though, so never ran into that.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      The other thing that's really cool in evil-mode is the ability to use emacs-lisp in `:s`. I used this once to get a grid of random numbers: 10i0 <ESC>yy9p ggVG:s/0/\,(random 10)/g
redis_mlc 6y ago
> " 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 6y ago

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).

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
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.
- westoncb 6y ago
  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).
- aidenn0 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
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
- aidenn0 6y ago
  The one thing I love about evil-mode over vim is the smart-case text replace (%s/foo/bar will change Foo to Bar and FOO to BAR and foo to bar). FWIW, ":set cb=unnamed,autoselect" (or "unnamedplus,autoselect") will probably do what you want in vim. Another thing I forgot; running evil-mode in "emacs -nw" disables all setting of the clipboard, even with `"+` while a terminal vim with X11 compiled in will let you still access the clipboard. Kind of a super-niche use, but shrug. I just tried A in visual-line mode and it was confusing. I'd never tried it before though, so never ran into that.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    The other thing that's really cool in evil-mode is the ability to use emacs-lisp in `:s`. I used this once to get a grid of random numbers: 10i0 <ESC>yy9p ggVG:s/0/\,(random 10)/g

redis_mlc 6y ago

> " 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.