hop in we're reinventing the homeric epic as a series of video game youtube raps

wow holy shit it's really good

the world is a museum of passion projects

but more so, in this case

we love to see it

what if it had a whole computer of its own? 😳

yea, there’s a series of strategic moves to resist counterpositioning / keep customers

but “all the other tools plug into mine” stays

and maybe now “all the llms know our data model” as some kind of new benefit of scale / publicity / age

yea platform saas network effects seem like the best chance of resilience. salesforce is a good example, there are many others

incumbent saas more or less can’t benefit from it, I expect

counterpositioning is hemlers coolest power and least obvious-from-the-name

incumbents are constrained by their existing lines of business.

even if they can innovate internally, they can’t bring certain products to market bc it would cannibalize what makes them money

process power is what everyone wants and thinks they have and is more or less nonexistent

knowledge proliferates through the industry fast, and most saas is built mostly the same way

maybe there’s some saas that have it? if so it’ll go away

brand

I generally don’t think it applies to saas very much, tbh

in the book helmer uses tiffany, th diamond company, as the example - they can charge 2x for the same ring as costco bc of brand power

maybe the bloomberg terminal and imessage blue bubbles fit, but not saas

cornered resource

depends a lot on the resource!

helmer has suggested that “top talent” might be a cornered resource; this is gonna vanish

others could get stronger, eg proprietary data that’s hard to reproduce (and you can keep it cornered)

switching costs are personal least favorite, but obviously powerful (viz oracle)

@fleetingbits.bsky.social suggests these may shrink (“hey claude migrate my data”), and that seems plausible

not sure how incumbents stop this, but at a guess, they’ll prevent you from scraping your own data

network effects seem like they are still relevant.

since your customers are on Slack, you’re on Slack, and making your own / buying some new cheaper version doesn’t have your customers

scale effects are (more or less) the reason the category exists. low marginal cost, after r&d investment, so returns accumulate to big players

its not clear the fate of this power. the benefit may not go away, but the barrier is disappearing, as fleetingbits alludes to. r&d costs continue to shrink

saas companies in the past benefited from:
scale effects
network effects
switching costs

sometimes brand or cornered resource
often counterpositioning at the start
very rarely, process power

yeah lets do it

okay 7 powers:
scale effects
network effects
cornered resource
process power
brand
switching costs
counterpositioning

helmer says these are the only durable ways firms resist margin compression

wonder if its worth enumerating hemler’s powers and comparing the before and after, for how saas companies can resist margin compression

I am impressed! I used it to help this person, it was incredible! We bridged a previously impassable divide and it was easy

in between my claudebugging sessions today I responded to a user in chinese, which I do not read or speak

simon and garfunkel in conversation with donne

“I am a rock, I am an iiiiiiisland”

no man is an island, that’d be so weird!

ask for whom the bell tolls. it tolls for boats

github.com/obra/superpo...

don't know what to make of this, is Claude simply play-acting what it thinks the user wants to see or is that just what it means to be conscious, to always be play-acting for some invisible critic?

its important to study history

🦋 is this METR?

oh yea that sounds like it'd improve me let me check with my potentiation supervisor

Miq dot moe