"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?
Actually in many cases it is for social KPI storytelling. I know some wealthy people and at gatherings they love to tell 5-10min long stories of exclusive processes that they followed to gain something exclusive while dropping names and numbers. The processes are easy to understand for the entire social circle (i.e. not technical or business achievements which they can't easily disclose).
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.
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.
I don't think the Brand Age is as bleak as this essay might suggest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
It’s sort of hard to unravel what’s part of the brand, it’s all imagination anyway.
The watch manufacturer, as part of their reputation, buys “premium” internal components. And then the hardcore watch-heads get to know that this model has that premium movement. Everybody in the club gets to signal to each other by knowing internal details that outsiders don’t notice (or even details that can’t be noticed, I mean, I assume by nowadays non-premium-brand movements are functionally identical to the premium ones).
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.
I entered this cult last year. It’s been super fun to spot and infer from a distance, as you say, these hidden signals that men have chosen to spend $20,000 to $120,000 on.
G-Shock says “I do things that are so dangerous and so off the grid your Rolex or Apple Ultra would shatter and die”. And it’s true, out of my whole collection, that’s the one that will still be within a ms of true time 25 years after the power goes out after the nukes go off.
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?
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.
I asked Claude to psychoanalyze why I got obsessed with them and it said I’m likely striving for something tangible that appeals to my engineer mindset that isn’t now obsolete in the age of AI. It’s my career’s existentialism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some of them will. And I suspect the set of markets in which they do will only increase—traditional SWE is probably dying, hard as that is to accept. But the fundamentals of engineering and business are nowhere close to going away. And those are the actually-hard parts of business.
Your taste buds prefer the flavor, not the brand. If they changed their name to "Caramel Diet Fanta" but kept the recipe identical, you'd still enjoy the taste.
The New Coke brand failed because people didn't like the taste, not the other way around.
Every time I drink a Coke (or any other soft drink), the brand's baggage (good and bad) is present. Unless you're doing a blind taste test, it's impossible to avoid that.
> I could have Claude code shit out a Facebook or Twitter clone, or an Uber clone
No, you couldn’t. At best you’d turn out a video game simulating Uber. The idea that all of the business is in its software seems to be one Silicon Valley perennially unlearns.
I've found the newer generation of founders understand that. The issue is they don't use HN anymore.
I've noticed a significant tone and demographic shift on the site over the past 2-3 years with more Western Europeans and Midwesterners and fewer Bay Area+NYC users, and fewer decisionmakers or decisionmaking adjacent people using the site.
And the deeply technical types who used HN largely shifted to lobste.rs.
Karrot_Kream (another longtime HN user) identified this shift as well [0]
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".
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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-infrastru...
Actually in many cases it is for social KPI storytelling. I know some wealthy people and at gatherings they love to tell 5-10min long stories of exclusive processes that they followed to gain something exclusive while dropping names and numbers. The processes are easy to understand for the entire social circle (i.e. not technical or business achievements which they can't easily disclose).
So, hobbies. You're talking about hobbies.
Economists have a term for these kinds of things where the demand rises as prices rise: Veblen goods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
Anyone with $(80,00-250,000) (which is a lot of you) can buy a Nautilus today[1].
This status-through-martyrdom ritual to get it from retail at MSRP is utterly bizarre.
[1] https://www.chrono24.com/patekphilippe/nautilus--mod106.htm
Holy shit that's an ugly watch too, looks like something outta chinatown lmao.
> Why bother?
ego, of course
Vanity. Ego is something else.
> 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.
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.
Because that’s only 2-5x the price of a new cheap car.
A watch at $80,000 is what, 10,000x what a new cheap one is?
But good for them! It’s really hard to be angry at them for buying said watch without it being some form of jealousy.
> 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.)
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.
I don't think the Brand Age is as bleak as this essay might suggest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
"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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Why is the Patek Philippe Nautilus so expensive?”
If you have to explain why your product is expensive, maybe it shouldn’t be.
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
The whole point of pg's essay is that signaling transitioned into being the entire point of wearing them primarily in the 1980s.
> 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.
It’s sort of hard to unravel what’s part of the brand, it’s all imagination anyway.
The watch manufacturer, as part of their reputation, buys “premium” internal components. And then the hardcore watch-heads get to know that this model has that premium movement. Everybody in the club gets to signal to each other by knowing internal details that outsiders don’t notice (or even details that can’t be noticed, I mean, I assume by nowadays non-premium-brand movements are functionally identical to the premium ones).
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.
I entered this cult last year. It’s been super fun to spot and infer from a distance, as you say, these hidden signals that men have chosen to spend $20,000 to $120,000 on.
G-Shock says “I do things that are so dangerous and so off the grid your Rolex or Apple Ultra would shatter and die”. And it’s true, out of my whole collection, that’s the one that will still be within a ms of true time 25 years after the power goes out after the nukes go off.
finally, a new essay. and coincidently, its about something i have been thinking about all week.
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
warren buffett always said brand was the only moat. only IP can be protected. Everything else can be replaced, rebuilt.
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.
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/differentiat...
> That turns out to be a profitable business though.
He does not disappoint. Also, not buying the watch industry parable.
Is it just me or are an increasing number of (high profile) people in the tech industry into luxury watches these days?
Gotta do something with those RSUs.
I asked Claude to psychoanalyze why I got obsessed with them and it said I’m likely striving for something tangible that appeals to my engineer mindset that isn’t now obsolete in the age of AI. It’s my career’s existentialism.
That sounds overly edgy. Tangibility has value, like buttons making a comeback in cars.
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.
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.
Anecdotally, in the trenches, I'm seeing a proliferation of Casio F-91w and AE-1200s. Maybe a counter response, lol.
Nike is a useful test case (1) here. Brand was the whole competitive moat for them and once athletic gear commoditized, then management spent five years cutting the things that sustain it: athlete relationships, premium positioning, product development. Each cut looked (somewhat) rational on its own but none of them were, taken together.
(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economi...
EDIT: Nevermind comments are apparently just a pg meta discussion..
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.
Also those vibe coded competitors will not make it. Feel free to try though
> those vibe coded competitors will not make it
Some of them will. And I suspect the set of markets in which they do will only increase—traditional SWE is probably dying, hard as that is to accept. But the fundamentals of engineering and business are nowhere close to going away. And those are the actually-hard parts of business.
(I look over to the Coca-Cola Classic on my table that I picked because my taste buds prefer the classic brand)
Your taste buds prefer the flavor, not the brand. If they changed their name to "Caramel Diet Fanta" but kept the recipe identical, you'd still enjoy the taste.
The New Coke brand failed because people didn't like the taste, not the other way around.
Every time I drink a Coke (or any other soft drink), the brand's baggage (good and bad) is present. Unless you're doing a blind taste test, it's impossible to avoid that.
> I could have Claude code shit out a Facebook or Twitter clone, or an Uber clone
No, you couldn’t. At best you’d turn out a video game simulating Uber. The idea that all of the business is in its software seems to be one Silicon Valley perennially unlearns.
I've found the newer generation of founders understand that. The issue is they don't use HN anymore.
I've noticed a significant tone and demographic shift on the site over the past 2-3 years with more Western Europeans and Midwesterners and fewer Bay Area+NYC users, and fewer decisionmakers or decisionmaking adjacent people using the site.
And the deeply technical types who used HN largely shifted to lobste.rs.
Karrot_Kream (another longtime HN user) identified this shift as well [0]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Karrot_Kream
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
[flagged]