Over a decade of experience in Senior and Staff engineering roles building scalable systems and user interfaces. I have extensive background working cross functionally in an organization to create and steward technical roadmaps, meet business objectives and keeping teams from hitting technical roadblocks. I help build teams up sustainably and have extensive experience in technical leadership and mentoring peers.
My background for the last 4 years in particular has been on scaling a business, with a general focus on the user experience and technical stability. Taking a product or suite of products from 400 to 40,000 active users without losing control of performance and keeping the user experience approachable is where I shine best. This means addressing performance impacting hot spots, adoption of new tools or improving existing ones, proper A/B testing, gathering user experience data to identify pain points and most importantly empowering teams to move fast sustainably through best practice.
The bigger problem is the experience. There are some integrations you simply can't do that Apple and Google, as their respective owners of the platforms, can. Full device backups for instance.
Its $29.88/year. It is $4.99 a month, which if you pay by the month would be $60, but if you're going for a year, I don't see why you wouldn't take the 50% discount
Five years ago, I paid a flat $45 fee for Cold Turkey, software which does the same thing on Windows and Mac which doesn't require I chip in for no additional work on the developer's part; It is completed software that runs on my own machine, just like Kiki.
Sure, diming $30/year is a 'better deal' than nickeling $5/month, but this is not the sort of 'deal' which this software warrants. This is not a service product, and pricing it like one is silly.
I don't think the sell through of Android phones to the wealthiest has been all that high. Celebs, top business execs, even heads of nations state are most often seen with Apple devices in their hands.
I'm sure not in every case, but even as far back as 2018 the trend line of wealth and iPhone ownership was high. Even today most app store developers admit that iPhone users tend to have more disposable income by a good margin.
Really, when I do a cursory google search of wealthy public figures that include them holding their devices, what I can find is they're clearly holding iPhones most of the time.
Epic is hardly a puppy. Scale isn't the only determining factor in how to view these actions by companies.
Ironically, the tech industry at large went after Lina Khan even though she was instrumental in moving forward with taking on tech industry monopolies[0] even though they themselves have complained about the App Store for years[1] because monopoly enforcement also included shutting down anticompetitive mergers like the Figma buyout.
Selective enforcement is how we got here in the first place.
This is why the tech industry writ large did a 180 on Trump and helped to get him elected. Apparently monopolies are good if it means payouts for investors. Despite the fact they'd stand to make more in a highly competitive marketplace, not less, as has been shown throughout history
They aren't because companies refuse to price discriminate. There are some exceptions, like Spotify where they called it out in a public space that the in app subscriptions were more than if you bought directly.
However, I have noticed that its very rare. In every other case I've looked into, from Omni apps to streaming apps like Netflix, I'm paying the same either way, and often with a more convienent way of managing the subscription.
Thereby, I think it goes undetected by most, because price comparing the app store to the non app store price will yield the same price most of the time. Though importantly, I have noticed, it is not always the same options. For example, regarding Netflix, I am paying the same price for my sub via Apple but new and returning customers can no longer pay for it this way, they must go to the website now. I also can't add additional members (effectively discounted second subs) either.
This has to do with the fact Apple did captiulate to allowing companies link to their own subscription pages and actually allow customers to be directed in that way with clearer and transparent language. However, I have noticed most apps with the exception of large streaming platforms have done away completely with in app subscriptions, and the prices are still the same whether its the web or via in app purchases on Apple's platform.
However, Google Play is no better in this regard. Even though they allow 3rd party payment processing as an alternative to using Google's payment processing, it has not lead to apps being cheaper on their platform, in the majority of cases. Which makes me wonder if the value is still there for a 1st party payment processor, or something else.
Without a strong propsition as to why I, as a customer, would use an agent over not doing so? Whats the value prop?
Thats always missing from these sorts of articles and comments, is why is this better
Related query: how is this really any different than what the W3C has proposed with Hydra[0] or other linked data APIs and formats? Who benefits by making their APIs more transparent, when 15 years or so ago there was a big push for this exact thing and it failed due to business concerns, not technical ones.
It's simply assuming what the way forward is without positing why other ways will not work to justify the position.
My secondary critque of the article, is using this as a basis of comparison:
>any product that can't be used by an agent will be as dead as a product without mobile support is today
First, I think its important 'mobile support' is defined. Is it as simple as a mobile friendly website or an app? Are we talking equivalent functionalities as well with the desktop counterpart?
Second, it ignores a ton of successful projects and products. Blender, Maya, Unreal engine. There's also a huge swath of games that only launch on PC or consoles.
If equivalent 1:1 functionality is to be considered, Adobe suite is still primarily a desktop tool, as is Figma.
I know there are a huge host of apps I'm missing too.
While more consumer apps migrated to web + mobile, you can often find functional differences between accessing on desktop vs mobile, where desktop is more complete. Its still not uncommon to have a mobile / tablet version of an app that is missing features that the desktop or website version is not.
> Without a strong propsition as to why I, as a customer, would use an agent over not doing so? Whats the value prop?
Same reason you’d use an automated approach to anything - you want to solve a problem and want to solve it along some Pareto front of minimal effort and maximum results.
You use search engines to find things and all sorts of other automated time saving approaches. Agents are just another one. I used one to find an old email receipt for a car seat that I’d not been able to find myself with keywords.
> Related query: how is this really any different than what the W3C has proposed with Hydra[0] or other linked data APIs and formats? Who benefits by making their APIs more transparent, when 15 years or so ago there was a big push for this exact thing and it failed due to business concerns, not technical ones.
Common data formats have thrived where they’re actually used by middle services that users actually use - aggregations of some sort. Scientific papers have common data so they are indexed, webpages have metadata so they appear in google search results.
Linked data for technical reasons fails because the real world is too messy. There needs to be a good business reason so that the formats get nailed down to a small reasonable set and everyone just does it.
Now, part of the problem with supplying apis is who is going to use them? Even the nicest ones are only useful for people building a product on it, or a few nerds.
This has changed. We have systems that can use apis from natural language. That means that normal end users can integrate multiple services nicely and easily, and add others into the same interface they’re already using.
Because you get to do other stuff while the agent's working. Maybe spending hours optimizing the best flight possible is fun for you, or actually reading online reviews, I ain't judging. I don't care about half the features the marketing copy brags about, I only care about the parts that affect me. This theoretical agent knows me, what I care about, and can optimize based on that.
That "other stuff" you get to do is up to you to take advantage of. It could be scrolling TikTok, or it could be learning a foreign language or calculus, it's totally up to you.
Blood. If things don’t reverse course this trajectory historically leads to bloodshed.
In many respects it already has. How many people have died just this year already because businesses didn’t do what they were suppose to? Because cutting costs with no consequences is seen as the norm?
Of course nobody wants to account for those externalities and when that blood comes back on them they become scared and use government force instead. You’re seeing the trial run with ICE as we write our comments on this forum
>I get the fear, but look at it from the investor's perspective. The US market is tapped out, Amazon is already everywhere it can be.
Heaven forbid we forget about the investors, and don't forget about the executive compensation!
I mean, seriously, is there no such thing as balance? I'm not saying investors should be arbitrarily shorted, but on the same token it doesn't mean workers need to always take the brunt of the change, which is how it goes down 90% of the time.
If layoffs were seen as executive leadership failures first and foremost it would be a small step toward the right direction of accountability.
>To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets.
Fallacy that the stock must continue to rise to the detriment of the workforce that supposedly would benefit. Never minding that RSUs shouldn't be seen as a primary form of compensation to begin with, there is a myriad of things companies can do to maintain the valuation of employee RSUs, like bigger grants.
Secondly, you're assuming to capture these emerging markets, a layoff is a must. In reality, it likely is not. If you have a surplus of resources, deploying them effectively would be a net win, as you re-allocate these folks to higher priority projects and workstreams. The incentive structure that C-Suites have built up since the 1980s however don't align with that, because executive compensation is entirely based around juicing the numbers on a spreadsheet, as opposed to being rewarded for building sustainable businesses.
>If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.
It doesn't, compensation is more broad than RSUs, and could be adjusted in kind. This is a solved problem.
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Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-vanderbeek
Email: scott@theawesomescott.com
Over a decade of experience in Senior and Staff engineering roles building scalable systems and user interfaces. I have extensive background working cross functionally in an organization to create and steward technical roadmaps, meet business objectives and keeping teams from hitting technical roadblocks. I help build teams up sustainably and have extensive experience in technical leadership and mentoring peers.
My background for the last 4 years in particular has been on scaling a business, with a general focus on the user experience and technical stability. Taking a product or suite of products from 400 to 40,000 active users without losing control of performance and keeping the user experience approachable is where I shine best. This means addressing performance impacting hot spots, adoption of new tools or improving existing ones, proper A/B testing, gathering user experience data to identify pain points and most importantly empowering teams to move fast sustainably through best practice.
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