Traditionally restaurants (like many software companies, incidentally) live and die by their "brand" and by their ability to get repeat customers. This more-or-less aligns incentives between the restauranteur and their patrons. But under the ghost kitchen model, there's no reputation, no real brand, so the restaurant is incentivized only to make food as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Now the web is full of bootstrapped digital media outlets that have no skin in the game in terms of real-world presence. They don’t have printing presses to run. They don’t have delivery trucks. They don’t have inventory to manage. It’s just air. There’s nothing there. Maybe a single open-plan office, or just a group of digital nomads working out of a corner of a coworking space. You can build and tear down an outfit like that in a week. Whereas to spec out, order, install, house, operate, and amortize/depreciate a single printing press would be a multi-year to multi-decade undertaking by a real business.
It’s all fluffy clouds now.
There's this "premium" burger place I like has alternative "delivery first" menu with lower cost offerings and a whole different name and branding. You can also order from this menu in person but you need to ask for it. I find this to be an interesting strategy.
Disaggregation of food-making services and seated-dining services makes a whole lot of sense, actually. Just look at any food court - why should each food-maker have its own seating area, when seating areas are interchangeable and cheaper to deliver at scale?
However, disaggregation of food-making services and branding absolutely doesn't make sense for anyone except for people trying to confuse you to make a buck.
It’s extremely hard to do many things well. If a restaurant specializes in pizza, they’re going to get good at doing that — their employees will know the best way to cook them, their recipes will slowly evolve over time, etc. If a restaurant rarely cooks a pizza, none of that experience and refinement is there.
Not to mention, DoorDash doesn’t have any obvious health ratings visible for restaurants in NYC. I’ll happily order from somewhere I know, but not some unknown restaurant. And what’s to stop a poorly rated dark kitchen from closing shop and reopening the next day under new branding?
The whole model feels gross. It’s centered around profit and questionable tactics, rather than making a genuinely good product that people come back for.
Exactly this.
Part of why I go to (or order from) a particular restaurant is that I've been there before and I have an expectation of the taste, quality, service etc. I could also, in theory, go look into the kitchen and see if there are safety issues etc (or outsource this to an inspector). Feels a lot tougher to do this if the "restaurant" is just a label on top of the dark kitchen product.
On a side note, this is why chain restaurants were so successful: you could go into one in any part of the country and have a predictable experience with some base level of quality. The mom and pop restaurant in the town you've never been to wouldn't have that same offering to you (it might for locals though).
I've been hearing this for years and I'm still waiting on it. The most I've seen is some employees using ChatGPT or similar to produce some initial code. But even those employees reported you have to spend the same amount of time painstakingly analyzing each section of code because it contains unusual or bizarre bugs in edge cases.
What AI was missing is the larger business context. I doesn’t know the politics behind why things are the way they are and why fixing and issue might cost the company 50k every minute or if library is updated it would break 15 business critical products without proper coordination.
M365 Copilot is bridging that gap. Right now it’s dumb and only access what you can see on OneDrive and sharepoint. With plugins and connectors it’s going to integrate into every development platform sooner or later.
I still think it’s some years out and will require a lot of human interaction before these generalized agents can be onboarded.
It’s a security nightmare for me. We basically just automated the recon for any attacker that has compromised a 365 Account. In my opinion it’s moving to fast even when it’s dumb as bricks and has the context of a 2 year old.
I’ve been using it to compare static analysis findings and m365 copilot returns a lot of the same findings with mitigation suggestion. It’s still not 100% though, but either is any secuirty testing.
I give it two years before the grunt work is fully automated
The AGI that might eventually come won’t free humanity from labor, it will free the wealthy from having to manage and support laborers.
At the root of it, the author is arguing that everyone needs to reach for common tools to patch together feature-packed solutions for a narrow set of customers. This somehow translates into it being cheaper to build and more appealing to customers. The problems I see:
1) Stuffing a bunch of third party services together to make a product is great for a startup looking to launch quickly, but in practice it is usually horrible long term. Quality integration between your features becomes difficult, and you will often sacrifice the UX as a result.
2) Outsourcing everything makes you a thin wrapper. Talk about commoditization.
3) The author seems to assume that the brand is the business, not the underlying product. That doesn't even hold for hamburgers, let alone specialized software verticals.
4) In an era of software being dumped on the market in droves, the solution is not to dump into the market even faster. I can tell you as someone coming from the medical side of things that people try doing this to us all of the time, and it's just endless heaps of garbage software. People would be smart to take the time to really think through our problems in the fine details where they matter. I know that doesn't mix well with a VC-backed growth at all costs model, but frankly that's not my problem.
The article feels like it was written by an MBA, not an engineer.
I'm trying to come up with a name to describe this style of writing. The key components are how hyper-confident the author is in The Future and how everyone who has even a day's more experience than the author is old fashioned and will certainly be roadkill this time next week.
This sentence makes it sound like he just decided "you know, this $15B company is fine, but I think I can do better" and just amicably 'left'.
The current equilibrium: data are co-located with processing, both the storage and the processing ("service") are things that clients are happy to pay to offload. Bringing data in is easy and often free. Taking the data out is hard / expensive, so customers stick unless the service becomes truly poor.
Imagine a player which makes it easy to take the data away. Now customers have easier time leaving, and will leave more often. They will go to the "sticky" SaaS players, and will get stuck there. There could be a bigger influx of new customers because it's less risky to try, but "sticky" providers also offer trial periods and free tiers.
Regardless of how neat the integration seems on paper, in practice the general "law" is that it won't work in the way you specifically want it to work. Often users get frustrated because they see the third-party has a feature, but that specific feature isn't setup to be integrated well, and instead the third-party "integration" hub is just the least common denominator functionality, which achieves "logo integration" but barely delivers value to users.
Developers are spoiled thinking about super well documented & flexible APIs like stripe, whereas in many industries b2b software providers are nowhere as robust. If you're not directly their customer, they won't put in the extra effort to support your integration.
I think Neuromancer absolutely nailed the future of business: giant ledgers holding records of every communication, event and transaction affecting the organization. And all of that information processed by AIs under the control of a small number - one even - of owners.
The AIs will decide whether they need to write and compile code to process the data or whether the task is small enough that they can just do it directly. Exactly like a human deciding whether to write a script or just use a spreadsheet. In this future the only B2B market is for AIs.
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What’s causing this breakdown? There’s too great a supply of undifferentiated software chasing increasingly picky demand that’s also locked behind a small number of monopolistic platforms extracting ever greater margin to access that demand (search, social, app stores, etc).
I'm sorry but that's not what's causing the breakdown. Most fintech products fail because they're solutions looking for a problem. Crypto currency is a perfect example. 'Dark kitchens' work as a business model for the same reason restaurants work as a business model. It solves a problem people are actually having i.e. they're hungry and need something to eat but don't have the time to make it themselves.
