Comment by CharlieDigital
1 day ago
> What's the hurry?
There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.
There's also a need to quickly adopt and understand the technology; take the Internet for example. If we were talking about the Internet, forcing teams to build and publish web pages would be one valid way to get teams comfortable with the tech, the workflow, the shift in how to propagate and convey information to an audience.
Without a mandate, many teams won't adopt the Internet as a medium of information exchange because their processes work just fine and have worked for the last 20 years.
I think it's fair to put AI in a similar light. Unless teams adopt it and use it, it's hard for an org to understand how to get value out of this technology and how it affects existing processes and assumptions.
> There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.
Those were always there, and will always be there. The type of time frames people are getting anxious about now rarely work in the real world, though, where potential customers don’t just switch products/service provides unless they’re facing catastrophic outcomes if they don’t.
And AI is not making the difference there that people think. I worked on a product that entered the market as a newcomer, wooed plenty of customers, and even though everyone _wanted_ it, only customers _urgently_ looking for a solution got on board quick (within <6 months).
Ironically enough, the product pivoting to Agentic AI hard killed a ton of momentum and interest from customers, despite exciting investors.
I was programming desktop applications when the web came along. I don't remember anyone ever saying they had been mandated to program for it.
The web took off all by itself because it had a clear value proposition for some use cases.
Many enterprises became legacy because of the web, many enterprises failed because they didn't understand the impact of the tech.
Sears was the OG Amazon. Imagine if Sears had seen it as the new digital catalog.
Blockbuster missed on streaming until it was too late.
Many, many legacy companies did not understand the web and did not understand the impact of the Internet to their business model.
And you think forcing blockbuster's software teams to use the Web would have changed that? You don't think they were using the web for all their corporate communications systems? I very much think they were, and getting blindsided by streaming had probably nothing to do with blockbuster's existing engineering teams not understanding the Internet. Their product teams didn't understand it, but they wouldn't be the ones being "forced to write webpages" either
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