Spotify's virtues became table-stakes last decade. What was once deservedly lauded as top-quality design and an incredible, high-value product has become... wel

Spotify's virtues became table-stakes last decade. What was once deservedly lauded as top-quality design and an incredible, high-value product has become... well... just normal. This phenomenon interests me broadly, beyond just Spotify. In the worlds of hardware, architecture, and human organization, innovations become iconic. They're remembered and studied for decades or centuries. There's an incredible staying power, where the implementation becomes the backing metaphor for the next iterative leap. In the software world, this just doesn't really happen. For a few years a sizable portion of emerging consumer brands asked their design team to "make it look like headspace," and that gave way to the generic, faceless cartoons of corporate animations (ie, it just dissolved into the next trend). We've seen countless clever teams introduce clever tactics that quickly proliferated, leaving the original step in innovation largely forgotten. Spotify was (for an entire decade!) a shining star of impeccable product design, but now that's just normal. In software, culture just quickly and seamlessly moves on.