They won’t have that sort of moment of self reflection until someone does something like use Flock infrastructure to stalk and assassinate the CEO of another YC company and then it will only be brief and fleeting before they double down on supporting this kind of egregious behaviour.
Let's just use Flock cameras to track all top-level YC people, publish everything we possibly can. Absolutely and utterly eliminate their privacy until they learn to respect ours.
Gods, I worry this is going to be how people view relationships in the future.
It's not the code or product, but the user base and time with it. Google, meta, etc aren't successful because of their product. It's because of the momentum and product scale. You could make a new Instagram easily. You can't get the user base to switch easily.
The examples you gave though are about switching cost, and network effect, and defaults baked into browsers by paid placements (e.g. Firefox, Apple).
And I even get that large, complex WP-based sites at least seem to have a lot of inertia keeping them there.
I'm just saying that I'm shocked Wordpress is something that anyone thinks still has upward momentum left in it. I would expect that 50 competitors to WP would be expanding their abilities to replace it, replicating and improving all its features, adding import functionality to make that migration easy, and building their own in-house plugins that would probably work for 90% of deployments without the malware risks of the wider WP plugin world.
And yes, I get that WP is still Free Software, but in my career I've seen most businesses paying for all-inclusive "WP hosting" (including what I assume is most of the work, patching). So the competitors I'm speaking of would specifically be competing with WordPress.com SaaS, rather than the "idea" of WordPress (The software).
I guess there probably are that many alternatives, I'm just shocked the WP branding has been enough to keep it relevant despite its disadvantages, bad security reputation, and insecure architecture.
It's really both. And that applies to a lot of HN darlings. Sadly, people's perspective can get cloudy when a positive perspective is tied to their financial well-being.
> The good news: I have seen no evidence Nvidia has borrowed against its stock or otherwise linked its equity value to these commitments.
Nvidia doesn't need it. It funds other companies. They do this thing that Nvidia doesn't do. It shows up on their balance sheets and Nvidia just gets to claim the valuation of the investment on its balance sheet.
Dude, I think it's worse. Some carpenters still make a living creating high-end furniture, or straight-up art pieces. I can't quite imagine a future where a hand-crafted app will ever be a status-symbol. The people who love coding for code's sake are (economically) screwed.
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