The price is set by the market as a function of some sellers charging by seats, others by resources used, etc, and some buyers preferring simple pricing models, others preferring usage-based, etc.
Looks like it. The only other explanation is they just stopped investing in other products and focused on Agents, thus no need for loads more of engineering.
No way in the world they got 30% gains. 5 maybe realistically
I recently had a refreshing conversation with a bank VP (head of AI), he said yes, they do see 30-40% improvement in "some" processes, so overall maybe 0.5-1% improvement.
So I'm betting they got 30% gains in e.g. "OCRing" and quote that, ignoring that the OCR part is 1% of an entire process chain.
Their ultimate agent product strategy feels like reducing cost of sales... by automating salespeople.
I have doubts that will ever happen, but who knows?
Sales folks are highly-compensated, so even making a few of them redundant (or making existing salespeople more efficient) would be a big win for companies (Salesforce's customers).
Compensated proportional to the revenue they bring in close to the time they bring it in. (Operations cost)
Very different from the software dev who gets paid today for revenue that might come in in two years. (Capital cost)
The average person has no idea of how capital sees the world. A worker feels resentful if they get paid less per hour of input, a capitalist feels resentful when they get paid less per dollar of investment. The Marxist viewpoint that they conflict directly is quite wrong: operations costs can be passed on to the consumer, but a capitalist is going to have to negotiate with their investors if they are having trouble with the bang/buck ratio of their investments.
(I'd had a job go really badly. A friend of mine said my problem was "I was only getting paid a fraction of the value that I create", I said "I tried getting paid more than the value I created and it ended in tears")
Why do people think costs can get passed on? They can't be. Pricing is about supply elasticity and demand elasticity. Sometimes you just need to eat costs because of the competition.
which sells for about $250 (worth it if you really use it.) My first instinct is that this product ought to be available for $25 on Temu if there wasn't a patent but I know from experience that if I talked to folks at TRX they'd have a good explanation of why my number is low. (e.g. TRX is in a position to pass costs on)
TRX is a rigid band that doesn't stretch. You set the "resistance" by the angle of gravity relative to the band.
A TRX push-up puts less load on the primary path than a conventional push up but is very challenging to all the other muscles that it takes to not flop over when you do it
These days I'd trust AMZN less than Temu. At least Temu and sellers on Temu still want to win your trust. AMZN thinks they have it and will still think they have it long after it's lost.
This is less about Marxist/capitalist and more about a change in regulation in the US that makes R&D expenses (dev headcount) amortized over five years (for taxes) versus sales being a straight-up expense. This one is going to be good for the stock price, and the AI Agent angle is a marketing masterpiece.
It's a good point about changes in tax laws for software devs. Makes me glad I work for a non-profit (a rare non-pathological non-profit no less!)
For all the discussion about a soft job market for devs, the fact that the last Trump administration made a tax change that puts a target on our backs comes up rarely but it is part of the explanation.
Salespeople are typically compensated based on commissions. At least the well compensated ones are. Automation can make things easier and streamline the sales process, but because the sales rep is paid a percentage of the GP of a sale, automation doesn't really their take.
>>“Better product”: We need to define "better" clearly, but if you're basing this off your R&D efforts, I would very much fear the competition coming my way.
Yeah, no, better product will always be a strong moat.
Competition could copy bette products for decades now without ai, but most software today is trash.
It's like credit cards. It's amazing benefits wouldn't exist without leagues of people chronically keeping a balance against near-usury levels of interest in some cases, but, fortunately, the set of people that use them correctly is much much smaller.
Most people irl don't give a shit about ads.
Evidence A: NFL and soccer growing in popularity every year despite 90 sec of ads every 5-10 minutes.
Evidence B: Netflix cheap and Spotify free being more than enough for millions of people.
Without them, our entire industry wouldn't exist. Being able to dunk on ads and invest time on ad blockers is a privilege, really.
$ 6.99 Standard with ads
$15.46 Standard
$22.99 Premium
The standard plans are 1080p. Premium is 4k UHF + HDR.
The differences between the standard plan and the standard plan with ads, aside from the ads, is that the plan with ads also: (1) only has "most" of the movies and TV shows Netflix, (2) and does not allow purchasing an "extra member" slot.
The difference between the standard and premium plans, besides 4K, is: (1) premium lets you download on 6 devices at once (both standard plans are limited to 2), (2) premium includes spatial audio, and (3) premium lets you purchase up to 2 "extra member" slots.
I'm really curious how many people who do not get Premium go for Standard rather than Standard with ads.
I subscribed a couple days ago, specifically to watch a show that was prematurely cancelled by its original broadcast network (on a cliffhanger!) that Netflix picked up and finished. I figured that since I had watched the first 3 seasons on broadcast TV with ads and don't recall being overly annoyed I could put up with ads for the rest, and I could always switch to a no ads plan if the ads were a problem.
So far, after 5 episodes of just under an hour each...the ads were barely noticeable.
It has shown me 3 ads, each 30 seconds long. They came at points where the was a major scene change so they didn't disrupt the show. They have, so far, been unobtrusive enough that I wouldn't even pay $1 extra to get rid of them, let alone pay more than double.
Can you explain how a service like YouTube could exist any other way?
> Economies without them can exist
We should be able to both hate ads and understand that they are a necessary monetization model for certain things. If you feel strongly that they aren't necessary what model should be used instead?
Why would you pay for something that treats you as a product? I would gladly pay for youtube if there was: no paid sponsorships, no ads, no algorythm manipulations, no collection of behavioral information, no clickbaits, no shitty content promoted and so on and so. Basically a service where the side paying is a consumer, not a product. Paying for service that is already extracting value from you in ways that are not respectable is insane.
A well pruned YouTube subscription is right now the highest quality video entertainment and information service in the history of the world. You literally just need to "like and subscribe" to a bunch of high quality videos and YouTube will recommend you a never ending supply of high quality videos. You can then continue to improve your recommendations with the like/dislike buttons.
If you're seeing "shitty content", clickbait and paid sponsorship, it means you haven't told the YouTube algorithm what you want to see. It's just the push of a button.
> no paid sponsorships, no ads, no algorythm manipulations, no collection of behavioral information, no clickbaits, no shitty content promoted
There are plenty of channels that do none of these. As for "algorythm manipulations", YT recommends more of what you like or subscribed to. Not sure what you expect a content aggregator and provider to do. Just have a search bar? I've come across so many interesting channels thanks to the "algorythm manipulations".
I pay for YouTube premium. But it simply would not exist to the same scale or utility if that was the only model that was funding it. Incredible to see the mental gymnastics needed to avoid that fact.
I'm not sure about them being garbage but I do believe very strongly that existing SaaS software is way way wayyyy overpriced. So there is an opportunity to build a simple, low price software that does less but just works.
This is where I like to operate. My career is implementing ERP software. It's expensive and I notice clients really value about 10% of what it can do. So I built an opinionated version of that, focusing on being the best at that 10% and keeping the features limited to just that versus the ERP approach which is a platform for all but a solution to none.
Good one. I love this approach. Work somewhere. Find which part of the big software is most valuable and you can make a business out of it and run a small business.
Overpriced complaints always sets off alarm bells to me if it solves some real problem/people like it/etc. There are usually migration costs and "way overpriced" may still be a small slice of overall budgets.
True. For some companies that price is not enough to move the needle. For some companies it will be. Calendly is worth 4B at this time. If I could move 1% of their customers then that's worth it for me. Executing this won't be easy by there are way more than 1% of the people who will move to save cost.
> Market may be saturated, but 99.9% of all software and apps are unusable garbage.
in terms of marketing the question is how you reach customers, and demonstrate to them that your software is not garbage unlike other within 5 sec of their attention span.
Isn't this a recipe to complacency? Things that are worth achieving take hard work. If I only do things that I _really_ want to do right now, I'm not sure I will live a fulfilling life. Especially when many of us have been trained by the internet to seek immediate reward above all else.
True, but at the same time immigrants have nothing to lose and everything to gain, thus in many cases they will work harder/longer and as result often be more skilled than an average developer.
And in general skilled immigration has many times over been proven to only benefit the country and that java developer you mention.
When this moment becomes reality - the world economy will change a lot, all jobs and markets will shift.
And there won’t be any way to future proof your skills and they all will be irrelevant.
Right now many like to say “learn how to work with ai, it will be valuable “ . No, it won’t. Because even now it is absolutely easy to work with it, any developer can pick up ai in a week, and it will become easier and easier.
A better time spent is developing evergreen skills.
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