24 ms·

The Brand Age

• itisit 7mo ago
  > That turns out to be a profitable business though. He does not disappoint. Also, not buying the watch industry parable.
  • deleted 7mo ago
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• tzury 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 7mo ago
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• mpalmer 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• busterarm 7mo ago
  I can't respond to tzury's comment because it's already flagged and dead but I honestly don't think that's quite fair on this board. The very same people who would be flagging that comment wouldn't bat an eye at saying they won't read or support anything by folks like DHH, or a hundred other prominent tech figures who have committed some ideological-wrong. It's just a similarly heavy-handed reaction from the other side of the divide. I don't find anything wrong or downvotable about people voicing perfectly valid criticisms about pg, his opinions, who he associates with and signal-boosts...unless these standards you all want to apply wrt cancellation are "for thee and not for me".
  • fragmede 7mo ago
    You've got enough karma to click [vouch] on the comment if you think it shouldn't be dead. It's a bit of a rant, and while there are good points, they're lost in an emotional diatribe and, I mean, I feel for them, but I can also see why it was marked dead.
    • busterarm 7mo ago
      I did click vouch, but I also still stick by what I said because I see all sorts of personal, emotional crusades against various tech figures reposted, signal-boosted, amplified, etc. on this board. I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'm just asking people to pause and think about what the comments would look like if this were in response to some other characters...
  • tomhow 7mo ago
    > The very same people who would be flagging that comment wouldn't bat an eye at saying they won't read or support anything by folks like DHH You have no way of knowing that. The guidelines against off-topic controversy and generic tangents apply, no matter who the author.
  • mikestew 7mo ago
    The very same people who would be flagging that comment wouldn't bat an eye at saying they won't read or support anything by folks like… First off, you might be right for some small number of cases, but I’d flag any and all rants such as this, regardless of the target. Off-topic, and doesn’t contribute to the conversation. Second, for those as you describe, when they go off on an off-topic rant about DHH, someone else will conveniently flag it.
    • busterarm 7mo ago
      There is not a single discussion on this board about DHH that doesn't get overrun with posts about what people think about the guy, regardless of the posts' topic.
  • renewiltord 7mo ago
    People like being repetitive on this board. Read Google in title and say “I never use Google because killing Reader”. It’s not like LLM. It is worse. Like hashmap. Deterministic same answer. That’s fine for them. But I have no interest in starting everything with a litany, land acknowledgement, and whatever other modern preface required. We acknowledge this message board is the rightful unceded home of the startup enthusiast people. We affirm their right to it and recognize their sovereignty. See, you enjoy me bringing pet subject into discussion with nebulous relation? You want always to see it? Good. I will do so. No downvote it unfair.
• 7777777phil 7mo ago
  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-economics-of-brand-decay/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economi... EDIT: Nevermind comments are apparently just a pg meta discussion..
  • fragmede 7mo ago
    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.
    • kridsdale1 7mo ago
      (I look over to the Coca-Cola Classic on my table that I picked because my taste buds prefer the classic brand)
      • stackghost 7mo ago
• ChicagoBoy11 7mo ago
  His point of Omega doubling-down on the things that would progressively harder to establish a moat on made me think about what we have been seeing with higher ed. It seems the "smart ones" definitely read the book that making the "education better," in a world where it is mostly free, was a fool's errand, and now the margins that they all compete it stray far, far away from the quality of the schooling. I work in K-12, and see the same things happening here too. P.S.: It is odd to me to have such a length pg essay been up for such a long time with just a handful of comments. Did something happen? I would've expected a wealth of discussion on a post like this by now.
  • fragmede 7mo ago
    The something that happened was ChatGPT. Enough commenters didn't like the idea that everything they write publicly online is fed in as training data for AI that there's been a shift in this site's community. That, and everyone got laid off, either for section 174 or AI reasons, but Twitter employees are no longer collecting that fast paycheck and posting here. I'm sure a data scientist could make a good analysis of if what I'm saying is backed by actual data, but that's my feel based on spending more time on here than is healthy.
    • zahlman 7mo ago
      > Enough commenters didn't like the idea that everything they write publicly online is fed in as training data for AI that there's been a shift in this site's community. Pardon; your theory is that this attitude was prevalent among people who like discussing pg's writing, and that they have left in favour of a new crowd that doesn't care about pg but is also pro- the AI companies? ... Because that doesn't seem to line up with the general tenor of discussion in threads about AI companies doing things.
      • fragmede 7mo ago
        Looking at the stats, there's been a huge influx of accounts. The theory that fits that isn't internal inconsistent is then there are multiple people using the sites that can be grouped into a set of people that don't care for pg, and a set of people that are pro-AI. How much of an intersection there is between those two groups, you get to imagine for yourself. The individuals in the group that see a PG essay, and go "Ooh, lemme dump my unfiltered opinion of him and not read the essay" and the individuals that won't bother with that link, and the individuals that comment on AI stories is a small set. The sata science query to prove me wrong wrong is left as an exercise for the reader.
• bogardon 7mo ago
  Is it just me or are an increasing number of (high profile) people in the tech industry into luxury watches these days?
  • observationist 7mo ago
    Status games are evergreen, and a lot of conspicuous consumption has fallen out of fashion. They've gotta flaunt their wealth and position somehow, and lambos are just too crypto-bro and gauche. It's also a sales tactic - a watch can be a schelling point if you're looking to network with someone who's into it.
    • kridsdale1 7mo ago
      Watches were understated in the 70s and turned more to gold in the 80s and a super proliferation of diversity in the 90s. 90s also had machismo Schwarzenegger sized cases for steroid men. 2000s brought Hiphop bling culture to them which embraced maximalism with size further increasing and 85 diamonds and rubies being something worthy of showing. 2010s austerity led to a retreat all the way to 1940s style trench and dress watches, cases back to 38mm. Post Covid, boldness is having a comeback. See the newest Planet Ocean. We are seeing bling and ostentatious gold again on celebrities this year.
  • mrexcess 7mo ago
    Anecdotally, in the trenches, I'm seeing a proliferation of Casio F-91w and AE-1200s. Maybe a counter response, lol.
    • tavavex 7mo ago
      I feel like the F-91w is as much of a brand-driven symbol as the luxury watches. The F-91w has come to represent this scrappy, minimal, no-nonsense mentality - but it's not the cheapest watch you can get, and I don't think it's even the cheapest Casio anymore. It's more expensive than it used to be, so you need to go out of your way to pay more to get this specific model. Because customers know that people will recognize it, and that will better project the way they want to be seen.
• creeble 7mo ago
  > So the only thing distinguishing one top brand from another was the name printed on the dial Respectfully disagree. Since the 60's (and one could argue, even long before that), watches are 1) fashion, and 2) male wealth-signaling fashion. That's it. Nothing more. And for males who subscribe to this wealth-signaling cult, they know from a long way away what watch brand is on that guy's wrist. Okay, today's brands signal maybe a little differently than just wealth. Casio G-Shock watches aren't substantially different than their non-G-Shock counterparts in any significant way, but they cost way more. The G-Shock brand signals... I dunno, sportsy-ness? Maybe it is closer to a pure fashion brand here. I think we've been in "The Brand Age" since the advent of advertising. There are plenty of products that have virtually no differentiation besides brand, and there (almost) always has been.
  • JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
    > they know from a long way away what watch brand is on that guy's wrist No, they didn’t. The makers of movements and makers of cases were separate. From far away you only know the case on the wrist. Not the movement. (I think Rolex was the first mass-market Swiss watch brand to vertically integrate. Patek may have been the first boutique.)
    • kridsdale1 7mo ago
      They were. The Acquired podcast on Rolex really opened my eyes to this whole world. They defined the playbook in the 1930s that Apple repeated in the 80s and especially 2000s.
    • creeble 7mo ago
      The movement isn't part of the brand. It's not part of the signal. The case/dial/sometimes band are the brand. And if you couldn't tell them apart, they wouldn't be any good at signaling, the entire point of wearing them.
      • JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
        > movement isn't part of the brand. It's not part of the signal. The case/dial/sometimes band are the brand The movement was the expensive part. Audemars, Vacheron and Patek only made movements. The retailer would then put it in a case. That’s the entire point of PG’s essay. > if you couldn't tell them apart, they wouldn't be any good at signaling, the entire point of wearing them Which might lead you to revise your hypothesis around why these watches were bought and made in the “golden age of watches.” Then as now there is such a thing as quiet luxury.
• jgrahamc 7mo ago
  "Because at Patek he'd encounter the most extreme brand age phenomenon: artificial scarcity. You can't just buy a Nautilus. You have to spend years proving your loyalty first by buying your way through multiple tiers of other models, and then spend years on a waiting list." Strange game, the only winning move is not to play. I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?) and, of course, there are lines outside "luxury" brands like Louis Vuitton. Why bother? PS I'll stick to my Casios: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/06/the-discreet-charm-of-infrastructureless.html https://blog.jgc.org/2025/06/the-discreet-charm-of-infrastru...
  • stronglikedan 7mo ago
    > Why bother? ego, of course
    • JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
      > ego, of course This is so silly. Do you really not have any hobbies where you spend inordinate time or money on things you could objectively accomplish quicker and cheaper, but having less fun, in other ways? Like, I ski. It’s a silly way to get up and down a hill in the 21st century. I’m not a watch guy. But mechanical watches are beautiful. There are idiots who buy them. But that doesn’t mean everyone who does is an idiot.
      • kridsdale1 7mo ago
        We can say all the same things about cars, but nobody thinks it’s odd that there’s a status culture about cars worth more than $75,000.
        • JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
          > nobody thinks it’s odd that there’s a status culture about cars worth more than $75,000 Sure. To each their own. I drive a Subaru. I don’t think it’s weird that others like a nice car. (I also think there are douchebags who drive both.)
        • 7mo ago
• nadis 7mo ago
  > "Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. But making the substantive differences between products disappear is what technology naturally tends to do. So what happened to the Swiss watch industry is not merely an interesting outlier. It's very much a story of our times." Really interesting parallel between decidedly traditional technology and today.
• noemit 7mo ago
  warren buffett always said brand was the only moat. only IP can be protected. Everything else can be replaced, rebuilt.
• psychoslave 7mo ago
  Brand are brittle. It takes a single CEO associated to some pedophile network or make a nazi salute and it's ready to plummet. If the business really mainly on the technical merits of the product/service, even blank brand is an option. Many brand as a façade to a single plant is a different tradeoff.
• crowcroft 7mo ago
  In almost every category meaningful differentiation is a myth. It sounds nice to tell yourself you've got it and talk about moats or whatever, but it misses the point. What people usually mean when they talk about differentiation is distinctiveness [1]. Design isn't a differentiator for these watches it's about being distinctive. At the end of the day when telling the time is commoditized, and expensive watches are just a status symbol it's all you've got. [1] - https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/differentiation-versus-distinctiveness https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/differentiat...
• benleejamin 7mo ago
  I don't think the Brand Age is as bleak as this essay suggests. Branding is not inherently unproductive, nor is it guaranteed to produce worse watches. They may be larger and less accurate, but consumers still (evidently) find value in the brand. A Grand Seiko or a Nomos or a Patek is perhaps now even more interesting & identity-productive than a watch was in the 60s. As technologists I think we're prone to dismissing improvements that aren't engineering-backed. But all life is storytelling, and labeling that work as "button-pushing" is… dismissive, to say the least.
  • armchairhacker 7mo ago
    What I got from the essay: "brand is the only way to beat competition when you can't significantly beat them on quality". It's basically the market suffering from success. You can buy a cheap quality watch today. For some product types there is no better alternative, like ISPs. But I'd argue this is because of monopoly, which is different from brand. Most monopolies (like ISPs) usually have negative brands, and there's no alternative not because one can't create a better brand (that's easy), but because the upfront cost to become profitable is too high.
    • KaiserPro 7mo ago
      Apart from the issue is omega (swatch group) has 3x the turnover of patek. The other part of the story is swatch is also quite successful at the shit tier watches as well. So this article misses the point really.
    • hammock 7mo ago
      So the cutting edge things are happening in places where brand doesn’t matter. I could think of better examples but moldbot/clawdworld comes to mind. Or ASML, or national lab physics, or cheap attack drones, or.. idk can anyone think of better examples? And “brand age” (as a broad moniker) is another way of saying innovation has stagnated.
      • widowlark 7mo ago
        innovation has stagnated because businesses have driven us to stagnation. Very few businesses provide any real value - the ones that do are running circles around everyone else - given the lack of ability, businesses turns to other, less useful methods of prying our money away from us and largely succeed because consumers are gullible and malleable.
• dzink 7mo ago
  Hoping to add to this perspective: The ability to transfer a lot of money in the physical shape of brand watches costing 200k per piece may have added to their appeal. AppleTV’s show Friends and Neighbours upselling their value as Jon Hamm tries to steal them from neighbours may be product placement. But these were all tactics from the 50s and 60s where relatively few media sources meant you could buy your way into the hearts of the masses with an ads campaign. Today we have a massively accelerated pace of society burning through fads and information - largely due to social media. The artificial scarcity trick is no longer an MBA secret. A brand, especially an AI brand, can burn in and out of favor in days. Transparency in society helps maybe bring out authenticity. Advertising of the past was often “advertising to your weaknesses” and that game is over. If we can structure the transparency and apply it to politicians and other less transparent institutions that count on “Brand” to the list (especially ones with high margins and large networks) maybe the world will see true competition that benefits everyone more. Lack of transparency (and liqidity, and availability) are what make trust bubbles that distort markets.
• shoman3003 7mo ago
  finally, a new essay. and coincidently, its about something i have been thinking about all week.
• d_burfoot 7mo ago
  Interesting historical anecdote: the Swiss became the world's best watchmakers because, in Protestant Geneva under the leadership of John Calvin, jewelry was banned as ostentation. But you were allowed to wear a watch - it was important to get to church and work on time - so people starting wearing expensive watches instead of jewelry.
  • Nursie 7mo ago
    Interesting. It's my understanding that in a similar vein, one of the reasons Belgium got so good at making tasty, stronger beers because wine and spirits were banned in the past. It's not quite 'necessity' being the mother of invention, but perhaps desire.
    • fsckboy 7mo ago
      combining the previous two comments, I once heard that there are chips/french fries all over the ground in Belgium because if you ask a Belge the time, they look at their wristwatch, immediately inverting the container of fries they are undoubtedly carrying. Not sure about Belgian potato or watch branding.
    • zigman1 7mo ago
      Not only that! You know the typical image of a witch? With a pointy hat and a giant round-shaped pot? Those were illegal beer brewers in Belgium! Women would put their pointy hat on their door as a sign that there might be, if you ask nicely, some beer for you to buy there.
• multisport 7mo ago
  Obviously not the main point, but I've been reading watch media online for over a decade now, I've read or heard this "Quartz Crisis" story hundreds of times and never ONCE read about the coincidence with the Bretton Woods agreement. Makes sense though, its basically oral history.
  • SuperHeavy256 7mo ago
    Wdym 'oral history'? Who has been talking about this history orally?
  • GenerWork 7mo ago
    I'd love to read more about the coincidence with the Bretton Woods agreement.
• lkm0 7mo ago
  Somebody's getting into watch collecting! Quartz watches were also developed in Switzerland: check out the story of the Beta: https://goldammer.me/blogs/articles/beta-21-history-guide https://goldammer.me/blogs/articles/beta-21-history-guide
• dworks 7mo ago
  I watched the Macbook Neo launch video yesterday and while the product is not very exciting, the video has great production value and it showed this: People want to pay for marketing. Not that Apple's only appeal is marketing, Mac laptops certainly have pros over the bottom and mid tier Windows laptops. But having seen that video, and knowing that other have seen it, are aware of Apple and its positioning, makes people feel better while using and owning their devices. People absolutely want that feeling and they're willing to pay for it.
  • chadash 7mo ago
    Apple clearly positions themselves as a premium product. There is some luxury element to it to (e.g., my friends will look down on me if I have an android), but it's not really the same as a true luxury product where brand is the main thing you are paying for. If you offered to sell me a macbook for 25% cheapr on condition that I remove the branding, I'd be happy to do so. I'm not a watch person, but I suspect that most Rolex buyers would not pay anything close for an identical watch without the crown logo.
    • dworks 7mo ago
      My main point can be put a little more clearly: it is not just that we are willing to pay for the brand experience and the marketing that builds it, but we actively want to pay for it. Macbook Neo customers want Apple to put out creative product marketing videos, they believe it is part of the offer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3SIKAmPXY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3SIKAmPXY4
      • majormajor 7mo ago
        Is there data to prove or disprove this? I haven't given a shit about Apple marketing since I was a teenager, and I have bought many Apple products since then. If they could turn their marketing spend into a discount on the price instead I'd happily pay less. (Of course, this would reduce their sales, so it wouldn't work that way, but I'm not in it for the videos I've never watched.) Obviously I'm aware they still have their fanatics, but how much of their sales is that really?
• gaigalas 7mo ago
  Chinese models are indeed cheaper!
• eykanal 7mo ago
  I'm struck by the utilitarian mindset of this essay. What Paul so disparagingly refers to as "brand" can also be referred to as "art". People _want_ art, and will indeed pay good money for it. Said differently, people _value_ art enough to differentiate it from "optimal design", and indeed a subset of people will pay top dollar for a suboptimal but artistic design. It is possible to view the fact that capitalist markets can turn a desire for art, individuality, and "something special" into a business as a bad thing. I'm not entirely convinced that's particularly interesting, though... it seems just a localized restatement of a generic "capitalism is bad" take.
  • chanakya 7mo ago
    I think he makes two points: - This change of what used be a functional object into a brand was done to appeal to one-upmanship (my watch is more expensive than yours) rather than the aesthetic urge which drives appreciation for art. He doesn't blame the watch brands, it may have been the only way they could survive after the triple shock. But.. - If you're an engineer and techie type and are drawn to the complexity and mechanistic elegance of mechanical watches, he's warning you that the problems being worked on in the brand age actually take you away from good functional design which attracted you there in the first place.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • zahlman 7mo ago
    Do you normally associate the acquisition of "art" with spending years proving loyalty to a corporation?
• diego_moita 7mo ago
  Because he focuses in the story of luxury watches, Graham sees only the brand tricks that work mostly for rich people. There are brands for non-rich: Linux is a very strong brand but virtually free and non-exclusive at all (think Android phones). Patriotism and country reputation might also be thought as brands. E.g. would Portugal's tourist boom happen without the Portuguese tarts popularity? Edit: my watch is a Pebble.
  • gwern 7mo ago
    Linux isn't a strong brand at all. Even nerds would struggle to tell you what a 'Linux' is (or as I prefer to call it, since that's every non-smartphone Linux I've ever used, 'GNU/Linux'). And I've never even heard of 'Portuguese tarts', and I've heard plenty about Portugal and briefly considered going there last year for tourism. Pebble went out of business, incidentally.
• NinjaTrance 7mo ago
  "When our time traveler peered into the windows of these shops, the first thing he'd notice was how large all the watches were." My only question about this entire essay is... where did this time traveler came from??? "Our" time traveler was never mentioned until this line.
  • badc0ffee 7mo ago
    Not true: > The best way to answer that might be to imagine what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine. [...] The first thing he'd notice, if he walked through a fancy shopping district, is that all the prominent watchmakers of the golden age seem to be doing better than ever.
    • zahlman 7mo ago
      Clearly, the time traveler went back in time to get inserted into a paragraph that GP overlooked the first time.
  • randallsquared 7mo ago
    It was several paragraphs before that, where pg said "[...] what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine."
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • rixrax 7mo ago
    Although PG isn't wrong here, people also have larger wrists nowadays that are able to comfortably support larger watches compared to ~50 years a go, never mind at the 1940s or 1950s.
• figassis 7mo ago
  “Why is the Patek Philippe Nautilus so expensive?” If you have to explain why your product is expensive, maybe it shouldn’t be.
• givemeethekeys 7mo ago
  Also explains why German cars look the way they do today. Emphasizing the brand, so everyone can see it.
• recursive4 7mo ago
  EconTalk from last month on the topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/fi/podcast/seiko-swatch-and-the-swiss-watch-industry-with/id135066958?i=1000749961046 https://podcasts.apple.com/fi/podcast/seiko-swatch-and-the-s...
• foolserrandboy 7mo ago
  https://www.econtalk.org/seiko-swatch-and-the-swiss-watch-industry-with-aled-maclean-jones/ https://www.econtalk.org/seiko-swatch-and-the-swiss-watch-in...
  • zie 7mo ago
    Don't worry, Seiko learned: https://www.grand-seiko.com/us-en/collections/sbgd223j https://www.grand-seiko.com/us-en/collections/sbgd223j
    • intuitionist 7mo ago
      Grand Seiko makes some truly beautiful watches, and also some terribly gaudy horrors.
• nimchimpsky 7mo ago
  [dead]
• philip1209 7mo ago
  I petition to rename "feature" as "complication" on software teams.
  • virgil_disgr4ce 7mo ago
    Hahaha seconded. Followup terminology: - Complication creep - Complication-complete - Complication requests
    • ninalanyon 7mo ago
      > Complication-complete Surely this cannot exist.
  • FeteCommuniste 7mo ago
    "It's not a bug, it's a complication."
  • widenrun 7mo ago
    Complication parity across all platforms
• spencer-p 7mo ago
  The question in the zeitgeist is whether coding agents will be to software engineers as the quartz revolution was to expert watchmakers. Commoditized software is here. Will there be a market for high-end, luxury software? Becoming an artificially scarce veblen good is unlikely to work for digital goods the way it has for watches.
• bensyverson 7mo ago
  > One obvious lesson is to stay away from brand. Wow, that is… not what I would recommend. Brand is one of the few things that will give you pricing power in the age of AI.
• pchristensen 7mo ago
  Sounds like pg is trying to justify an expensive new hobby :)
  • furryrain 7mo ago
    No, he's advising us that we software developers might be coming to an end of a golden age, that if so, resistance is futile, and how to find another.
  • handedness 7mo ago
    Sounds like pg is trying to deduct an expensive new hobby :) FTFY!
• Traster 7mo ago
  >That's not why brand age watches look strange. Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it's not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things. The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it's going to be a weird, bad world. This is a wild thing to say. Brand age watches don't look strange. They look beautiful. Incredible thought and care and intention is put into their design. The people who buy them love them. It's so funny to me to get this far into one of PGs blogs and sort of realise "Oh right, you don't actually understand beauty". It's very hard to read this as much more than a slightly autistic man not understanding that it's ok for people to like beautiful things. It is not worth it to me to spend £100k on a watch, but I don't deny it is to other people, I'm not going to pretend the watch is undesirable. But it does make me wonder whether Paul things that YC is successful today because it has a better design than other startup programmes, or is it successful today because of it's brand?
  • ChadNauseam 7mo ago
    They may be beautiful, but the fact remains if you could produce and sell Patek Philippe Nautilus for $200 no one would be interested in it. The same is not true for most other beautiful objects
    • Traster 7mo ago
      Well firstly, they don't charge $200 for them because they can't produce them for $200. But the point I'm making is he seems to be trying to say they aren't beautiful. He says he's describing this "dark" world or "strange" watches. I do actually think he probably thinks the watches look strange. I don't think he thinks they're beautiful, maybe he'll find a brand to fall in love with one day. I doubt it because he seems to have too much of himself invested in this. But the people buying them don't think they're strange, they think they're beautiful. I don't go out telling everyone that they shouldn't buy a Ferrari because my Honda Civic can do the same job.
      • 7mo ago
• ploden 7mo ago
  Calvin: I wish my shirt had a logo or a product on it. Hobbes: … Calvin: A good shirt turns the wearer into a walking corporate billboard! Hobbes: … Calvin: It says to the world, “My identity is so wrapped up in what I buy that I paid the company to advertise its products!” Hobbes: You’d admit that? Calvin: Oh, sure. Endorsing products is the American way to express individuality.
  • latexr 7mo ago
    https://i.imgur.com/dY2hkOJ.gif https://i.imgur.com/dY2hkOJ.gif
• atotic 7mo ago
  I expected this essay to end with a note about software's golden age.
  • zahlman 7mo ago
    It seems to be trying to make the same point (about AI as a "disruptor" analogous to quartz movements) but more subtly.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
• monster_truck 7mo ago
  Wild timing on this. Been seeing a huge uptick in people "trying to learn opsec" as they fumble around for ways to make money with openclaw and land on "selling fake bags/shoes/watches", seemingly emboldened by those who value these brands trying to use openclaw to secure mispriced items or snipe auctions. Funny thing is, I'm not sure anyone is actually doing either thing successfully. Every time I've looked into an openclaw success story it's ended up being complete fiction.
  • zahlman 7mo ago
    Could it be that fake success stories (and, perhaps, associated "training material") are the real product there?
    • monster_truck 7mo ago
      100%. Why become a drug dealer when you could sell $1200 tickets to a webinar that teaches people to deal drugs?
• sinzone 7mo ago
  software is becoming like the fashion industry. you go to Prada vs Hermess because you think one does better shoes and the other better bags. But is not because neither could do better shoes or bad it isb ecause your mind positioning is set. Software. everyone can do it now. but you still buy lets say Crowdstrike for security, because is in your brain for years as security software.
• roughly 7mo ago
  Naomi Klein’s famous book No Logo* does a great job diving into the expansion of branding that happened around the 80s and into the 90s. As someone who’s lived in the post-branding world my whole life, it reads like an anthropological text about my culture from an outsider. It’s fascinating the kinds of things we take for granted. * https://bookshop.org/p/books/no-logo-no-space-no-choice-no-jobs-naomi-klein/5d2f9e482af7c2e2 https://bookshop.org/p/books/no-logo-no-space-no-choice-no-j...
• ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
  > Now they cost a lot because brands spend a lot on advertising and use tricks to limit supply, and what the buyer gets in return is an expensive status symbol. Sounds a hell of a lot like the diamond industry. Also, the top fashion houses, but both industries are taking a drubbing from artificial competition (artificial diamonds, and knockoffs, of various stripes). I'm a believer in branding. I worked for many years, for a company with a "top-shelf" brand, and saw what it took, to maintain. But it takes a huge amount of discipline and "silly" stuff. Brand damage can come from a million different directions. I have found very few people are willing to do what it takes to maintain a top brand. For quite a while, there have been "brand-only" products, like Von Dutch, or Life Is Good™. They are the two-dollar hat, with the twenty-dollar logo. Like Izod Lacoste or Members Only, in the last century.
  • thimkerbell 7mo ago
    How do "big brands" deal with efforts pretty clearly (but deniably) aimed at sabotaging their brand? Besides the ebay approach.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
      Like pissing in beer vats?[0] Sometimes, you can't fight it, but other times, trying to correct can only make things worse. This is where having sober, experienced PR people and CEOs comes into play. There's no "textbook" way to deal with this stuff. It is different, each time, so you need smart leaders (something in short supply, these days). The company that I worked for, was a camera company. One of their brand-protection strategies, was to have as much control as possible over any images made public from their cameras. They went waaaaaay out of their way to help photographers get the best results, and it was a bitch to get test images from prerelease kit. [0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/corona-urine-rumor-court-case https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/corona-urine-rumor-cou...
• iamwil 7mo ago
  I kept thinking that he'd eventually compare it to writing software by hand, and how we're at the end of one golden age. But he never did. So I wonder what the impetus for the essay was.
  • renjimen 7mo ago
    Ditto. I kept waiting for the AI comparison. My interpretation was less agentic coding than the commodification of LLMs, forcing Anthropic and OpenAI into a pivot to focus on brand. Anthropic's spat with the DoD could be viewed through that lens: losing money on a deal to better position the brand.
  • dandellion 7mo ago
    About a quarter in I figured out, if there was a point to the article he should have gotten to it already, if it's taking this long maybe he just wants to write about watches. So I skimmed and I was mostly right, the way it's presented I think you can probably draw comparisons to a few other things, not just writing software, but it's more of an optional exercise for the reader.
  • pu_pe 7mo ago
    There was even a post on HN yesterday making a similar comparison of LLMs and the impact of quartz in watchmaking. I think the comparison is warranted, and human-crafted code will perhaps become a brand differentiator in the future too.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
• KaiserPro 7mo ago
  I'm still not really clear on what the point PG is driving at. However swatch group(omega was force merged in the 80s to form the swatch group) has 3x the turnover of Patek. More over Swatch caters to both high end and the poors + kids. So brand is.. good? so long as you only cater for the rich? I'm not getting that really.
• zem 7mo ago
  > Jaeger-LeCoultre's web site says that one of their current collections "takes its inspiration from the classic designs of the golden age of watchmaking." In saying this they're implicitly saying something that present-day watchmakers all know but rarely come so close to saying outright: whatever age we're in now, it's not the golden age. not sure what tfa is trying to say here, but this is far from being an indictment of the current age. the term "golden age" is (from what I've seen) usually used for the time when an industry or field was taking the leap from niche to mainstream, and in the process defining some of the things that would later come to be considered characteristic. by that token, of course the golden age of watchmaking is not today - the field has already gone mainstream and indeed does retain a lot of the characteristic features that the golden age innovated upon and defined.
• Herring 7mo ago
  He's omitting the most important bit. Data from the OECD shows highly unequal societies tend to be more status-obsessed, leading to higher spending on "positional goods" (items bought to signal status). These economies often have higher advertising expenditures (as a percentage of GDP) to fuel that competition. Inequality is quite corrosive in many ways, including leading to fascism.
  • pnexk 7mo ago
    true. This is a good essay but there’s, as to be expected, not too much of an acknowledgement of the economic and political backdrop of the arena this played out in. A lot of discussions of this essay therefore get diluted into musings about aspects of human nature and its tendency to obsess over status and while missing the broader point about the role these sorts of corpo strategies play in modern societal wellbeing.
    • Herring 7mo ago
      One of my favorite books about inequality is The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett). It asks how this country can be so incredibly rich, unprecedented in human history, but still create so much suffering (physical/mental/emotional). https://ibb.co/jZs6NhLt https://ibb.co/jZs6NhLt
      • gwern 7mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(Wilkinson_and_Pickett_book)#Re-analyses_and_alleged_failures_to_replicate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(Wilkinson_an...
• canpan 7mo ago
  Maybe the phone market is still in its golden age? It's a wonder you can get the best phone in the world for only a little over $1000. And everyone can buy it. Online without a line. Comparing with luxury watches which cost a magnitude or two more and are beaten in precision by a $10 casio. I guess the thing to watch out for is technical stagnation and "good enough"? Uh..
• tlkGah 7mo ago
  Apparently this was written to wrap the AI promotion: "The more subtle lesson is that fields have natural rhythms that are beyond the power of individuals to resist. Fields have golden ages and not so golden ages, and you're much more likely to do good work in a field that's on the way up." Cigarettes were resisted, leaded fuel was resisted, nuclear energy was resisted. AI is already being resisted and the resistance will grow.
• another_twist 7mo ago
  GPT doing a great job summarizing and providing a counter: what's they key thesis here and the argument ? *Key thesis:* When technology eliminates meaningful performance differences between products, industries shift from competing on *engineering and function* to competing on *brand and status*. The Swiss watch industry after the quartz crisis is a clear example: mechanical watches stopped being valuable tools and became *luxury symbols whose value comes mainly from branding, scarcity, and signaling wealth*. *In one sentence:* The essay argues that when technology makes functional differences between products disappear, industries shift from engineering competition to branding competition, and the modern luxury watch market illustrates how that transformation works. --- If you want, I can also explain *why this essay is controversial among economists and designers*—there are a few big assumptions in the argument. And the counter A few places the argument is debatable (even if it’s persuasive as a narrative): It treats “brand” and “engineering” as mostly opposed. In practice, luxury buyers often do pay for engineering (finishing, durability, serviceability, movement architecture), and those technical choices can reinforce brand rather than fight it. The tension is real, but not always zero-sum. It downplays other drivers of the Swiss recovery. The rebound isn’t only “they discovered brand.” Things like Swatch’s role in recapitalizing distribution/production, industry consolidation, improvements in manufacturing, and globalization of luxury demand can explain a lot of the late-1980s revenue surge alongside marketing. The “artificial scarcity = managed asset bubble” framing is provocative but contestable. Scarcity can be interpreted as: capacity constraints, quality control, long-term brand stewardship, or channel strategy—not necessarily “bubble management.” It may function bubble-like in resale markets, but that doesn’t prove intent or fragility in the way financial bubbles work. Some claims are asserted more than demonstrated. Examples: Rolex “abandoned research” after ~1960; “only three survived as independents”; “most brands are owned by six holding companies”; “they rebuy hundreds per year.” These might be true in broad strokes, but the essay uses them as load-bearing supports without showing evidence in-text (beyond a couple notes). The design-history claims are simplified. Watch size and shape trends aren’t only branding; they’re also driven by changing tastes, ergonomics, manufacturing norms, sport/tool styling, and shifting notions of masculinity. “Big = cheap historically” is directionally true in some eras, but not a universal law. The gender section is especially shaky. “Women never really went for mechanical watches” and the steam-engine analogy read like overgeneralizations—there are strong counterexamples (and cultural variation) that complicate that story.
• ls-a 7mo ago
  pg no longer in his golden age
• renjimen 7mo ago
  Where I thought this was going: entering the Brand Age of AI. LLMs become commoditized, so the big labs increasingly focus on marketing and rhetoric to maintain market share. See the Anthropic spat with DoD (though I do applaud them for that, whatever their motivations).
• socalgal2 7mo ago
  Interesting that this comes out after this podcast https://www.econtalk.org/seiko-swatch-and-the-swiss-watch-industry-with-aled-maclean-jones/ https://www.econtalk.org/seiko-swatch-and-the-swiss-watch-in...
• theturtletalks 7mo ago
  Essay's very insightful, but it misses a big distinction. Watches are straight-up B2C consumer luxury. Once the real engineering edge vanished brand and scarcity could carry everything forever. Buyers pay extra precisely because it's status jewelry that doesn't need to improve year after year. Most software especially SaaS like Salesforce or Shopify is B2B infrastructure. Brand loyalty there is way thinner and more fragile. Businesses don't pick tools to feel cool or exclusive. They pick what actually runs the operation better keeps their data safe and doesn't screw them long-term. Unlike a finished watch you own outright, software is a live service. You never know if tomorrow they'll yank a feature you rely on, hide it behind a new paywall, churn the UI, or jack up prices to please shareholders. Enshittification is brutal in this space because companies have to keep growing revenue forever. Open-source or self-hosted options keep winning ground for exactly that reason. True ownership and predictability beat any brand when it's your P&L on the line.
• alexpotato 7mo ago
  I've been reading Rory Sutherland's book Alchemy and it's full of fascinating insights about marketing/branding etc Case in point: - company was testing out their mail based fundraising drive - they randomly tested cheap vs expensive envelopes, regular envelopers vs side opening envelopes etc for how people could send back a check - they found that expensive envelopes beat cheap and side envelopes beat top loading The part that was fascinating is that many folks would think "what difference does it make what kind of envelope you use?". Sutherland points out that putting a check for a large amount in a cheap envelope somehow feels "wrong" even if people can't verbalize this. Another example is how in the 1950s many food engineers were obsessed with the idea of "food nutrient pills" and how they would replace cooking and eating out in restaurants. While it's true that things like Soylent and Huel made inroads with the tech crowd, most people still love going out to restaurants. The point being b/c eating out isn't only about eating: it's also about taking your wife out for your anniversary or meeting your siblings who are visiting from abroad. I mention this b/c the HN crowd tends to be very logical/rational (including myself) and this book was a real eye opener around how people actually make decisions. 0 - https://amzn.to/3Plf65m https://amzn.to/3Plf65m
  • bigstrat2003 7mo ago
    Similarly, when I was a teenager I knew a guy who built guitars by hand. He is a master craftsman who makes beautiful instruments, but he told me one time that he had customers sometimes lose interest because his guitars were cheaper than similar competitors (5k vs 10k as I recall). He wound up raising his prices, and got more sales as a result, even though the guitars hadn't changed at all. It was a really interesting (and to me, bizarre) demonstration of how people can make decisions very irrationally at times.
    • johnsillings 7mo ago
      veblen goods
    • alexpotato 7mo ago
      Couple of other interesting pricing stories: 1. Cereal Apparently cereal makers were losing money b/c they priced their product at a much lower price point than, at the time, the regular breakfast of bacon and eggs. They hired a consultant who pointed out they could raise their prices as long as it was lower than bacon and eggs, make more money and still be cheaper. 2. Raising prices There is a story in one of the pricing/economics books about a store keeper who told her assistant to halve the price of jewelry that wasn't selling. The assistant misheard and doubled the price. The jewelry immediately sold. 3. The shelf that always sells In the book about Shopsin's in NYC, the author and owner mentions that certain shelves in a store will sell out of whatever is on that shelf. Regardless of price, product, time of year etc. Apparently, putting things right by the front door in supermarkets is the opposite: very few people buy anything that is there. I noticed that one of the Real Housewives of NJ had her food product there and thought to myself: someone is giving you bad advice and/or humoring you by putting your product there.
• contingencies 7mo ago
  I agree with the premise, and note well: food has just finished its Brand Age. The combination of dark kitchens and last mile delivery has shown clearly that consumers have little loyalty to brands and simply want convenience at a reasonable cost. From this lens, nearly the entire QSR industry which dominates food particularly in America is about to tank, and indeed many of them already lost 30-80% value in 2025 (Sweetgreen, Krispy Kreme, JITB, Cava, Shake Shack, Portillo's), but the new reality isn't yet priced in. The vast majority of them operate on a brand and franchisee model meaning they're structurally incapable of exiting the paradigm. We're about to use automation exploit that: zero brand investment, 100% CVP. Now seeking capital partners for at-scale GTM. https://infinite-food.com/ https://infinite-food.com/
• socalgal2 7mo ago
  I actually dislike most "branding", by which I mean, I dislike when the name/logo of the brand is on the product itself. I get that puts me in the minority. For me, partly because I don't want to be seen as showing off and partly because I feel like if you want me to advertise your brand then you should be paying me, not the me paying you. And, once noticed, it's on so many products I wish it wasn't. The sink in my bathroom says "Sterling" as does my toilet. The saddles (seats) on my two bicycles have their name on them. So do the front forks on one. One that's most silly to me, the tires have huge branding but the actual useful info, what pressure they need, is nearly impossible to read without perfect lighting and then me taking a photo and zooming in. My phone holder, basket holder, rear racks, and pannier are all branded. My toaster oven, rice cooker, electric kettle, stove, refrigerator, even the garbage disposal has it's name stamped into the top visible part. All my casual shoes have a visible exposed tag at a minimum. Fortunately dress shoes don't but I rarely have a chance to wear those. My computer case, my monitor, my hub, my KVM, my laptop holder, my headphones, my mouse, they're all advertising their brand at me. I'd be fine if it's in some hidden area (inside the fridge, under the rice cooker, under the laptop holder, etc...) but ultimately I'd prefer no branding. But, there just aren't any choices. Most people either want to show off the brand they bought or they don't care. Few are like me that would prefer no visible branding. And so you can't get unbranded things (or I can't)
  • ratmeadow 7mo ago
    Yeah I feel completely the same and largely do not understand when people are obsessed with branding. I'm assuming it's some primitive brain social hierarchy stuff where we seek to have everything be stratified by social value. Also I have a related point on consumerism. A lot of things don't really need a brand to begin with because there is little need for so many options. Like if you have to advertise your brand identity to me to have your product be a success, I generally assume your product is a solution in search of a proper problem. (Yes often they do solve problems, but I will argue many modern day problems are bullshit/fake.)
    • Swizec 7mo ago
      Good branding is recognizable without the logo, especially to the target audience. For HN, macs are a good example. You can remove all the apples and we’ll recognize the laptop. My Triumph motorcycle has a similar property. You could remove all the logos (there’s just 2 stickers anyway) and even my girlfriend who is not into bikes will recognize it by the engine sound alone. Kitchenaid and Smeg appliances have a similar property. BBC hides all the logos and you can still recognize the standup mixers in their baking shows.
• strix_varius 7mo ago
  > Obsolete technologies don't usually get adopted as ways to display wealth. Is this really true? Mechanical watches. Sailing yachts. Fountain pens. Analog audio...
  • stuartjohnson12 7mo ago
    VHS, The Dewey Decimal system, punchtape programming, fletching, sailmaking
• doctorpangloss 7mo ago
  pg blind spot about brands: they cohere with a very specific but common lifestyle. 1. TV (TikTok) 2. Cars (and parking) 3. Buying shit is fun I don't own a TV or use TikTok, and I don't use a car, and I don't shop. My experience with brands is very limited but also not that unusual. It's very San Francisco, a town whose nice parts (and problems) are very much, the future of your community, not its past. In contrast, there's Reno. It has 10 lane roads criss crossing a business district that is as big as the whole of San Francisco, and it's all brand stores with ample parking. There's no like, La Taqueria. There's Qdoba and Chipotle and Target. Are you getting it? You drive everywhere and you watch TikTok while you drive, and Costco and other brands pay TikTok to tip the scales to make videos mentioning them go viral (that's their ads business, to people who don't know how it really works or get hopelessly fixated on requiring a citation for every fact they learn online), and it's a brand culture. It's videos of cute girls - they weren't paid to do this! - but they're in Costco buying shit, and there are a lot of cute girls on TikTok, but curiously it's the videos of theirs interacting with brands that go viral. And most of all, parking. There's so much parking to buy your brand shit. Driving around in your really cozy car, spending your whole day never elevating your heart rate. And it works! Your life is really great with brands and cars and TV, because likes and wirecutter recommendations are a very secular, very nonjudgmental form of truth, it looks like objectivity and requires little brain power to digest. So brands and cars and TikTok all synergize together like a cheeseburger's interior. It doesn't really have much at all to do with trade or innovation nowadays.
• nxtfari 7mo ago
  very interesting article but i was surprised pg’s conclusion was the opposite of what i expected. to me it was like oh this is brilliant, instead of trading effort linearly for money you can just control image and be paid outside for it. reminded me of, e.g. chamberlain canned coffee, which tastes terrible but has emma chamberlain’s personal brand lifting for it in the aisle every time you see it.
• sailfast 7mo ago
  Are we in "A Brand Age" or does The Brand Age occur only in different spaces after a technology becomes ubiquitous and like a utility, so the only way to command a premium is branding? What things are not quite there but will have their Brand Age next? AI? Spaceships? I'm also a bit confused as to whether there's judgment in the article though. He's applauding branding as a survival technique, but also saying it's silly and vestigial. So if we find ourselves in a Brand Age because we've succeeded in solving the last really hard problem we should... drop everything and find another problem so we can move it into the Brand Age? Either way - thoughts were provoked so thx for that.
  • CobrastanJorji 7mo ago
    My crackpot theory: USB chargers and cables. Right now, a quality USB charger is cheap, but it's indistinguishable from a shitty USB charger, and there's a practical difference. And it's frequently on your desk. And it's got a lot of space for branding. A luxury USB cable would be identifiable and also (hopefully) also work well for whatever you might plug it into, until they invent the next new USB standard. Of course, there are downsides. Nobody's gonna just walk away with your watch, but a cable on your desk that also costs $1000? And also, a lot of us would look at your diamond-encrusted USB adapter and think "this man is a moron."
    • boisterousness 7mo ago
      Great minds think alike! For $99.95, you can own an exquisite 0.75m USB-C 2.0 "High-Definition Audio Cable" [1], featuring "high-purity 0.5% Silver conductors and a Metal-Layer Noise-Dissipation for the most efficient dissipation of radio-frequency noise." It has "Direction-Controlled Conductors: All drawn metal strands or conductors have a non-symmetrical, and therefore directional, grain structure. AudioQuest controls the resulting RF impedance variation so that noise is drained away from where it will cause distortion. The correct direction is determined by listening to every batch of metal conductors used in every AudioQuest audio cable. When applicable, arrows are clearly marked on the connectors to ensure superior sound quality." Power Delivery: No. Country of origin: China. My web search didn't reveal any $1000 USB cables - doubtless those are offered only privately to the most discerning connoisseurs. [1] https://www.audioquest.com/products/forest-usb-c-c-digital-audio-cable https://www.audioquest.com/products/forest-usb-c-c-digital-a...
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• CobrastanJorji 7mo ago
  > It's hard to do good work without a good problem. This is an amazing quote, and I'm immediately adding it to my repertoire. Thank you!
• tempestn 7mo ago
  I like a lot of the points made here, and I think they likely hold truth in many scenarios. That said, in the case of watches (no pun intended), Grand Seiko seems like a counterexample to a few of the points made. First, they are very much still sold on the basis of both brand/design and engineering. Spring drive is an engineering marvel, and a lot of people appreciate such works of human ingenuity even if they are not technically the optimal approach to solving the underlying problem. (Though it is nice never having to change batteries.) Even their notably high frequency mechanical movements are desirable on that basis. More importantly, GS watches have very distinctive design elements that are easily recognized (ie. branding), and I would argue they sacrifice nothing in terms of usability to achieve that. Their dials in particular are works of art, but they make the watch no more difficult to read, just more enjoyable.
  • neuchatel1968 7mo ago
    I too felt like the omission of GS was a miss. While the Swiss are competing for exclusivity, GS's UFA is clearly generations ahead of anything else in the market. That said, as a GS owner, I still think their marketing sucks, the watch photos on their website are garbage, and no one except us watch nerds are going to remember SBGA211.
• jorisboris 7mo ago
  Innovation brings a golden age, then innovation flattens, competition arises and branding becomes more important Flying was having its golden age around the times of Concorde and 747, coffee bars were great when Starbucks reinvented the 3rd place and social media was cool when it just came out It very much relates to that Steve Jobs clip about what happens when the marketing people take over the company
  • rswail 7mo ago
    Many countries have avoided the complete brand/chain-ification of the US market. Cafes and coffee places are still great, Starbucks did for them what McDonalds did for food. They're a known standard of quality. It might be low, but it's known. Starbucks didn't invent the 3rd place, or re-invent it. As jobs moved from manufacturing to services, more people were able to work in a way that the "3rd place" offers. The ultimate extension of that is WFH. The actual planes are much better today than in the "golden age ... of Concorde and 747", what ruined it was the security theater as a result of 9/11, and the race to the bottom of the service offerings. Business classes (especially international and Asian airlines) is much much better, economy has more services (individual entertainment, USB, power etc), better seats, but much worse seat pitches, and nickel-and-diming every item possible (ticket transfers/changes, luggage, seat selection, meals, etc). So not so much "Brand Age" for air travel, it's more a stratification.
    • zimpenfish 7mo ago
      > The actual planes are much better today than in the "golden age ... of Concorde and 747" Although if what I learnt from QI is to be believed[0], the internal air quality is now much worse than when smoking was allowed because they don't recycle the air through filters as much (if at all) these days. [0] I believe they're about 90% reliable with their "wacky" facts.
      • rswail 7mo ago
        Depends which airline and which plane. Airbus 350 and Boeing 777 have much better air, higher pressure than older planes.
• rudderdev 7mo ago
  I never understood the demand for luxury watch businesses. From what I have heard, it is widely used as a tool to transfer value (read $$ laundering). I do not know how prominent it is but if so then we might want to look at it from the utility perspective (to achieve that goal) than the "brand" story.
  • wan23 7mo ago
    With the exception of a few brands that have the artificial scarcity that PG wrote about here, pre-owned watches have the same kind of value decline that pre-owned cars do. If you are ever in the market for a nice watch that is actually available at retail, you should probably buy it used instead.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• jkusniar 7mo ago
  Watch nerd here. Watched this just yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrYMWRUMOeA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrYMWRUMOeA Looks like PG drew inspiration from there. Or just a coincidence
• baxtr 7mo ago
  The watches mentioned carry status for a certain sub-group of the population. The utility stems not from the functionality of watch itself but from what it signals to other people. It’s a simple status games. PG, like every other human being, also plays status game. But not with watches. He plays with a different group of people. With different rules for status gain/loss. Maybe it's: who has the better blog, or the better investments. I don’t know because I don’t live in his world.
• KnuthIsGod 7mo ago
  Or BYD vs BMW. BYD is more reliable and arguably better by metrics that matter to people. BMW still has more cachet and is bought largely for the brand value.
• genxy 7mo ago
  When the tech tops out, the ecosystem moves from natural selection to sexual selection.
• KnuthIsGod 7mo ago
  A rich relative arranges charity balls. Her friends buy 20K tickets to them and in return she buys tickets to their balls. The money presumably goes to some good cause ( her thing at the moment is some rare pediatric neurological disorder ) and the organisers get to socialise with each other and wear millions in clothing and jewels.
• TonyStr 7mo ago
  > Obsolete technologies don't usually get adopted as ways to display wealth. Why did it happen with mechanical watches? For many men, the wristwatch is the only socially acceptable jewelry they can wear. Jewelry is usually used to signify some combination of status and taste, so it makes a lot of sense to spend more on watches with nerdy features like automatic windup, spring drive, etc. Women have other ways of displaying status and taste.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• benrutter 7mo ago
  I liked reading this essay, but, I get the same vibe as a lot of PG essays. Which is, great writing and really intelligent thinking on an interesting subject, but without really being aware of ther stuff people have previously said/thought on the topic. For instance: > Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. I think, for better and worse, brands are a lot more than that. Brands at least start out as a designation of quality, but in modern society, they're an important part in companies avoiding legal liability, and having more distributed supply chains. Nike couldn't be the global brand it was today if it directly managed all its factories. Modern brands are a part of the economic landscape that is fundamental for making the kind of distributed supply chains that allow globalisation to be possible. I think the essay mixes brands a little with conspicuous consumption, which can also happen without brands, like with artists or jewels. Its just that brands are so ever present, its not always obvious to see these examples. So yeah, we definitely are in "the brand age", but brands definitely aren't non-functional at all. The world really would operate very differently without them.
  • manbitesdog 7mo ago
    There is a fantastic book on this topic called "By Design : Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV" that cover the inception of modern brands. It's a very similar story to what happened to watches. The industrial revolution made quality clothing accesible for everyone, so the cloth appearance no longer was a clear indicative of status, so brands started placing their emblems on the outside of the fabric inside of the inside. At the time it was seen as gross, obvious and bad taste. Guess we had a century to normalize it.
    • cschmidt 7mo ago
      Looks great. I just ordered it. Thanks for the recommendation.
      • manbitesdog 7mo ago
        I also got the recommendation from here, happy to see I'm giving it back!
• yread 7mo ago
  > Of course they don't call them golden ages as they're happening. "Golden age" is a term people use later, after they're over. That doesn't mean that golden ages aren't real, but rather that their participants take them for granted at the time. They don't know how good they have it. But while it's usually a mistake to take one's good fortune for granted, it's not in this case. What a golden age feels like, at the time, is just that smart people are working hard on interesting problems and getting results. Is he talking about software development here? Are we going to call the pre-LLM era the golden age where relatively limited set of individuals had to be paid a lot to craft artisanal "code" which with LLMs became super cheap?
  • busssard 7mo ago
    i love the analogy. the golden age of the web was before javascript, when only people who knew how to code html were able to make websites. however things come in cycles, so who knows maybe the next will come by
    • ido 7mo ago
      But js didn't make it any easier, html is in fact simpler (and you still needed to write html post-js).
    • yread 7mo ago
      > only people who knew how to code html were able to make websites And the people who were able to click Save as HTML in Word creating a complete jumble that only worked in IE
  • oytis 7mo ago
    Arguably, not even the pre-LLM era, enterprise sales started dominating over technical excellence some time before LLMs were invented.
    • philipallstar 7mo ago
      Enterprise sales predate the 2000s-2010s when B2C work really took off with places like Google, Amazon, and platforms like mobile. Mainframes in the 1960s. Relational databases in the 1980s. Productivity in the 1990s.
• vagrantJin 7mo ago
  I think this is the age of craftsmen.
• penetrarthur 7mo ago
  > So what happened to the Swiss watch industry is not merely an interesting outlier. It's very much a story of our times. I am not saying it is, but it sounds like the first paragraph of every Gemini deep research.
  • elevatortrim 7mo ago
    Considering he is one of the most prominent tech writers, PG's articles are likely among the most impactful to have influenced AI writing styles.
• pembrook 7mo ago
  Observing people from Silicon Valley discover the concepts of "brand" and "taste" is quite amusing. It's like watching a hyper-rational alien species trying to understand humans. > "Wait...So you purchased this at 5X the price of another product because of how it makes you feel about yourself, and not for its utility? Fascinating!" We've been in the brand age for 200 years. This is nothing new. Technology products have just been so uniquely useful due to fast innovation that silicon valley has largely been able to ignore the centuries old techniques of Madison Avenue. Every single market as it matures ultimately turns into a marketing competition, not a product competition. It has always been this way. Silicon Valley is the new Detroit.
• sanj 7mo ago
  > Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal So they’re the same thing but from two frames of reference? I’m not sure this metaphor holds.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • KolmogorovComp 7mo ago
    Yeah it really felt hammered in as a way for the author to try to look literate and punchy, but it does not work.
• red_admiral 7mo ago
  A good time to remind any of the "watch nerds" mentioned that this exists: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
  • vrhs 7mo ago
    What an amazing post, thank you for sharing
• __0x01 7mo ago
  What was the interesting problem that Swiss watchmakers could have focused on, instead of pursuing brand?
• sukruh 7mo ago
  Good points, but implicitly equating good design with functional design irks me. You can define your terms as you wish, but at least be upfront about it. > Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal. Functional design is centripetal. "Good" design is one which achieves the designer's goals, which are often much more complicated than that.
• gomox 7mo ago
  From the title and the beginning, I was sure this was going to be about the imminent brand age in software with the commoditization of the software engineering discipline brought on by AI.
  • fnands 7mo ago
    Yeah, either that or the commoditization of LLMs. I.e. in the early days (2023-2025, lol), companies were mostly differentiated by the quality of their LLM, i.e. GPT-3.5 was leagues ahead of anyone else, so was for serious work the only game in town. Until recently it was basically only the US based companies (OpenAI/Anthropic) with models worth using. Now, Anthropic and OpenAI are neck-and-neck, and Chinese models are catching up fast, and the models are becoming commodities, and as long as they reach some threshold of quality/capability, it doesn't really matter to most customers. So now we might be reaching the branding stage of LLMs. I.e. do you go for Anthropic, who are branding themselves as the responsible ones, or OpenAI, who are branding themselves as... the innovators? Not sure what they are going for these days. If all models are roughly equally capable, all that's left is branding. At least those are the thoughts it provoked in me. If that's what Paul Graham meant or not I have no idea.
    • cousinbryce 7mo ago
      I think you’re right about the impetus for the piece. I’ll say that branding is for things consumed in public, I expect vendor lock in before branding. But as you know this site is awash in speculation about how the lack of differentiation will play out
• Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  Oops. I may have written too long trying to respond to it that it got too long for hackernews haha. I have written that comment on here now[0] The TLDR tho of my post/comment is that Brand age that PG mentions is essentially something so linked to marketing and advertising and spending money/injecting money and becoming the differentiating factor. This can be a big thing for pure capitalists but the current forms of advertising rely on black boxes attention centralized which you have to go to ads for and this whole system feels rent seeking for the existence of livelihood/businesses extracting money from them small or large and very famously, Adam smith was against forms of rent-seeking. Marketing to me seems like converting everything to a statistic and everything related to marketing subsequently starts having infinitely looser morals which I don't think I need to be telling everybody of. It feels like trying to capitalize on top of anything or everything without any regards to anything. I do think that we do have some say in it. The nature of AI is that its out and there is no way of putting it back in the box especially with OSS models reaching parity and no company is putting their frontier models back and this means that AI slop is something that we just have to deal with. But instead of dealing it with brands which can inject money because they got money. It's better if we try to filter things on top of authenticity and I do feel like we have a say in this. have a nice day. [0]:https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/i-dont-want-brand-age-i-want-authenticity-age/ https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/i-dont-want-brand-age-...
• zug_zug 7mo ago
  I think the challenge of the PG essay (which to me is defined by an attempt to take the particulars of a cultural moment, romanticize the individual, and attempt generalize toward universal laws and principles) is that they are too idealistic for this cultural moment There was a time when software was closer to a freer market and there was room for anyone to be the next google. But this moment is deeply political, tactical, and the existing incumbents have so much power that learning the intricacies of their systems may be make or break for any of your goals (e.g. how to advertise on google, or get featured on the app store, how to secure a government contract, etc). It isn't a time for abstract generalities (like chasing "golden ages") At least I don't think anybody is or should be asking how to build "great" stuff anymore, great hasn't won in many categories. Most things that were great were so only to gain a moat and then enshittify. I'd be really curious if he's happy where the tech-world is now, if he sees it as an oligopoly, if he sees it as meritocratic, and if he sees any hope of it getting better.
• abetusk 7mo ago
  I only skimmed, and I was expecting a treaty on how "brand" is the new currency, but instead the thesis is the opposite: > ... Is there some edifying lesson we can salvage from the wreckage? ... One obvious lesson is to stay away from brand. ... Sure, you might be able to make money this way ... but pushing people's brand buttons is just not a good problem to work on ... > Go where interesting problems are, and you'll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they'll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.
• abe94 7mo ago
  An aside but there is a wonderful article on how the swiss watchmaking industry won the "brand age" here - https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/why-we-still-have-mechanical-watches https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/why-we-still-have-mechani...
• lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
  Such analysis always presupposes an anthropology (and a psychology) and a metaphysics. Without at least a good, sound intuition of these, you are bound to fall into all sorts of traps. Materialism will move you toward reductionism, pseudo-mysticism will move you toward reification or projection, and so on. So, when we talk about the real and imagined value of a watch, we can consider it from different angles. You cannot pick one (like the first) and reduce all value judgements to just that measure. 1. the utility of a watch as a timekeeping artifact 2. the aesthetic quality as a work of art 3. the quality as ornament/jewelry 4. the effectiveness as signal of wealth 5. the quality as a particular kind of technology (mechanical vs. quartz), perhaps as an expression of historical techniques The aim and measure are critical. The trouble, then, is not that Patek is bad. A nice Patek watch is of excellent quality as (2), (3), and (5). As (1), for everyday use, yes; along an absolute axis concerned only with accuracy and precision, not so much. (4) is where the pathological and deceptive begins to creep. Where the market price with respect to (1), (2), (3), and (5) would reflect a just price, (4) becomes a race to the bottom of the most vulgar and base and irrational sort.
• burgreblast 7mo ago
  If the author had been paying attention _while it was happening_, rather than looking back at history and re-stating it to fit his mental model, he would have seen something else. Namely, the whole story of the rebound is Nicolas Hayek and Swatch. You see, at the explosion of quartz watches, everyone already had a drawer full of Rolexes and Pateks and AP's. They had done that. But telling time? More accurately? That was actually pretty boring. Nicolas Hayek became a hero. It's fair to say, yes, he consolidated ASUAG + SSIH and built volume and all that. But really? It was about Emotion and redefining the Essential Function of a watch. Swatch made Swiss watches cool again. The marketplace was saying Japan vs. Switzerland and quartz vs. old fashioned gears. Swatch rejected that and said "fun, whimsical. Wear not one, but several. You be you." What landed the message was wealthy Swiss keeping the Rolex in the drawer and believing in the the $19 Swatch. Aston Martin and Swatch. That was the way to roll. It became a thing, the kids bought in, and the Swiss Watch Industry (Big Watch, lol) stayed relevant vs. Japan. It was a country vs. country fight and Swiss prevailed on creativity. Swatch was such a watershed moment, tha that across Europe the key to Industrial Success became "Personalized Mass Production." Why? Because swatch quickly grew to be able to launch 2x70 models a year. The German Industrialists included personalized mass production and innovation in every slide deck for the next 20 years. And if you don't think that matters, look at Zara, and then Shein. Same playbook as Swatch. Swatch changed everything.
• blabla1224 7mo ago
  Thank you for enabling the reader mode on this blog!
• CAPSLOCKSSTUCK 7mo ago
  I care about as much for the brands' movements as my own.
• corry 7mo ago
  Classic PG essay in a lot of ways, but I was expecting (a) the entire watch discussion to be 1/10th of its length, and (b) lead DIRECTLY into a social commentary around how every area -- politics, software dev, music creation & distribution etc -- are now firmly in their terminal brand ages. A political admin lies directly to your face daily - well, the base doesn't care because they've bought into the brand. The Truth and principles are irrelevant. A talented musician is making innovative, fresh music - but hasn't yet learned the ability to market herself on IG/TikTok - well, she won't reach an audience because she can't compete in a brand game dominated by marketers and AI-driven beat-makers. The music is irrelevant. Creating software used to be a very human thing - empathetic understanding of the user's problems, a dash of inspiration and good taste, and you get some cool stuff and possibly a valuable company; but now, if all that's automated, what is it? The craft is irrelevant. Hmmmm. Perhaps his essay wasn't dark enough.
  • aalukabi 7mo ago
    I thought the essay would get into current events, but I felt sad that it didn't. And I don't feel it was dark, it was just just a chapter of history.
  • Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
    Kudos! This comment really gave simplicity to my feelings on this whole thing too! (Favourited your comment) I just want to add a minor point that the marketing/advertising industry in general just sometimes feels very unethical to me and I am worried about that too. Increasingly so, The only way to survive in brand age is to connect to two or three centralized platforms. Authenticity feels redundant. > A talented musician is making innovative, fresh music - but hasn't yet learned the ability to market herself on IG/TikTok - well, she won't reach an audience because she can't compete in a brand game dominated by marketers and AI-driven beat-makers. The music is irrelevant. Although I could've ended my comment previously, I do think that there are just very few cracks and ripples within the algorithm. At some point we have to step up to preserve authenticity. It isn't as if those people aren't trying but that you can't find them. I found this person who makes music[0] on my youtube shorts on how his genz cousin told him to make videos of his everday life with his music in background (He sells pizzas and left college to make music) and there is a small community of viewers/music listeners who have joined him now. It made me genuinely think and stop from the doom scroll, Although small but it was one sure of an experience. I do think that if there is a race to the bottom for code/infra/even marketing. At some point, the idea becomes of fulfilling/creating an experience but I do think that the passion of the people who create things isn't gone to waste because the passion that they applied into creating any form of software now, can be reflected back to the user in form of experience. Atleast that's my take. Another product I found interesting like this was fluxer.gg[1](discord alternative) Maybe there can be a platform/mass adoption of the thing where one can just share cool people doing cool things and have links of them which can say "hey check them out! What they are doing is cool" (I actually tried out some bookmark app just right now but funny thing happened haha where it accidentally destroyed my whole collection as I tried to have a collection name be All, and they don't have support so that I can't even guide them to fix it :/ so its better if we use open source solutions in this maybe, Luckily I was only trying it out but this actually makes me feel like this sharing should be made easier and less error prone it would be hard to see if average people realize this and if they do end up doing it at decent scale where it makes meaningful difference tho.) Edit: I rediscovered Linkhut, it feels really good as well. I will be having some fun with it especially with the social elements of it, its front page is about what the official logo of html should be :D (https://ln.ht https://ln.ht) [0]Fuji Gateway - Tuesdays, Am I Right? (Official Lyric Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijjb_0RW28c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijjb_0RW28c [1]Fluxer: https://fluxer.gg https://fluxer.gg
• bambax 7mo ago
  I'd bet good money the whole reason for this essay is PG tried to buy a Patek and was told to fuck off. This is his way of getting back at them. The last paragraph goes so far as to predict/hope that the whole sector will at some point simply die: > mechanical watches would start to be seen by the next cohort of young rich people as an old guy thing. It's hard to imagine a luxury watch brand surviving that. In cauda venenum if there ever was one.
• neuchatel1968 7mo ago
  Just missed the part where the Swiss decided to cancel the competition than allow Seiko to win in 1968.
• mfrankel 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• w10-1 7mo ago
  Respectfully disagree - using PG's own wisdom. 1. You don't find a golden age by looking for interesting problems. You find it by solving customer problems, even if they're boring. 2. Luxury watches, or anything luxury or fashion, are almost by definition using brand for status signaling. That's a business where you don't control your destiny but jump in front of the crowd. The most important thing about brand is that it reduces the information costs of reliance, which only gets more important as customer reliance is deeper and more complicated. Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Netflix, McDonalds, Halliburton, even Berkshire: they're somewhat distinguished by quality, but mainly get their premiums by their reliability at serving complicated needs. (Indeed, the problem with the beautiful luxury mechanical watches is that they require good care and maintenance - high cost of reliability. Quartz watches just work, reducing the market for mechanicals to status symbols.) This is (yCombinator's) golden age because software/ai and devices/(mainly Arm, somewhat robots) now can reach many more customer needs. But being reliable means marriage: lifelong devotion to this one problem. Already taken: the transferable-skill opportunities of general-purpose computers, frameworks and infrastructure, consumer internet and cloud compute. Now available: small and complex niches.
  • unholiness 7mo ago
    He's definitely conflating two things: watches changed from utilities to fashion items, and watchmakers changed from engineering to branding. In this example, the one change caused the other, but it's just one example. It's no excuse to paint all of branding with the same brush and ignore how, say, Milwaukee's branding provides a valuable signal of real utility. I think it's tempting to be equally dismissive of branding and fashion because they are both forms of virtue signaling and therefore have all its perversions. However, they're operating on different actors. Branding is virtue signaling by companies to its customers. Fashion is virtue signaling by customers to other people.
    • matheusmoreira 7mo ago
      Aren't luxury swiss watches extremely well engineered though? They seem to be really well made. It gets to the point they turn into family heirlooms. In an age of planned obsolescence, cost reduction and cheap materials, something that's known for being well made has a lot of value.
• andai 7mo ago
  The argument assumes that there is one platonic ideal wristwatch, and that it is maximally thin and maximally precise. But I know a lot of people who wear watches for different reasons. Some people's idea of "brand" is the frugality of the F-91W. Some people wear obnoxiously large watches. Some people go for something more classy and subtle. And then there's a great deal of difference in taste. Some watches are works of art. Some are made of wood. Some are full of diamonds. I think a lot of these niches are underserved, and so your brand can be "the one that owns this niche."
  • ninalanyon 7mo ago
    I know hardly anyone who wears a watch now.
• daralthus 7mo ago
  While I mostly agree with the grim conclusion, I think there's an important aspect ignored that in every domain the very first and very best brands could leverage as good design and purpose: art and fun. Remember winamp skins? "The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." - Shklovsky on defamiliarization What pg is really writing about is enshittification, consumerism.
• samrus 7mo ago
  Man he must really be getting older. Getting into watches (even in his own way lol) is a telltale sign
• yj-builder 7mo ago
  [dead]