Comment by nchmy
1 month ago
I generally agree. Industrialization puts a decent floor on quality, at low cost. But it also has a ceiling.
Perhaps an industrial car is better than your or my artisanal car, but I'm sure there's people who build cars by hand of very high quality (over the course of years). Likewise fine carpentry vs mass produced stuff vs ikea.
Or I make sourdough bread and it would be very impractical/uncompetitive to start selling it unless I scaled up to make dozens, maybe hundreds, of loaves per day. But it's absolutely far better than any bread you can find on any supermarket shelf. It's also arguably better than most artisanal bakeries who have to follow a production process every day.
The difference between an artisinal car and a mass produced car is that the former can only be used by one person.
This has never been true for "artisanal" software. It could be used by nobody or by millions. This is why the economic model OP proposes falls apart.
Exactly. Breadmaker is only as good as the last loaf. Software only needs to be perfect once.
> Perhaps an industrial car is better than your or my artisanal car, but I'm sure there's people who build cars by hand of very high quality (over the course of years). Likewise fine carpentry vs mass produced stuff vs ikea.
I think automobiles are a bad example: I'd trust the reliability and quality of a mass produced Toyota or Honda over a hand-made Ferrari. (Of course there are bad mass produced cars as well.)
Your Toyota Corolla is more reliable than any supercar ever made. Supercar owners just have money to pay people to handle the unreliability.
But reliability isn't the only measure of quality.