Don’t think this article should frame consolidation as a failure of the individual bets.
The reality is likely that shipping these separately was (1) faster given org structure at the time and (2) made sense in the environment (e.g. if Perplexity launches a browser and that turns out to be what users want, we should have one too). Better to iterate and move on then try crystal balling perfect projects.
Strongly agree. Personal software is also personal responsibility. It’s fun to dream up features, much less fun to be responsible for their implementation and maintenance.
I grew up on Windows, switched to Mac (college and beyond), and over time, have come to hate Windows. It feels like it doesn’t have a user’s best interest in mind. I’m just there to have Copilot or XYZ service shoved down my throat. I’m not sure Mac is actually any less sinister but at least it feels less so.
> The Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway buys up the land around new station sites before they start building them. This rail-plus-property model makes them one of the few profitable transit services in the world.
I really enjoyed this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_roPoXi8QI describing more in detail how they did this. It has as much to do with historical circumstance as it does with good decision-making. The MTR is an impressive organization. MTA in NY seems to be taking a few cues, prioritizing in-house expertise.
Great stuff. People are getting used to agents as the interface for everything, even work as simple as "change label X to label Y". More speed on that front is welcome. The Codex "blended mode" they refer to will be useful (similar to Claude Code bouncing between haiku and opus).
I imagine it's a win-win. This could significantly help their tokenomics.
The example showing a plan being generated instantaneously is interesting. Human understanding will end up as the last, true bottleneck.
Transitions take time. 0 -> 1 replacement of existing interfaces is (1) not easy and (2) not a practical approach to market adoption.
"slapping on a chatbot" is a v0 attempt at re-imagining what software looks like. It's not very inventive and sometimes it sucks, but it's easy to understand and implement and we're very early in this era.
The distribution of change also isn't uniform. Excel might not have changed dramatically, but software engineering apps are evolving rapidly. Clawdbot/moltbot hint at new forms of personal computing. Look for the future where the optimism is.
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