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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, e
by w10-1 8mo 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 8mo agoHe'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 8mo agoAren'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.