The ripples are still decimating over socials from the Rails keynote that DHH presented 1. And hats off to him for choosing to be deliberate in his framing of opportunity. The effort in setting the story arc, and the execution: dropping a hard truth, whilst simultaneously set a waypoint of hope and positivity.
As a delivery expert that has been working in product creation and rollout for plenty years now, I found it comforting that a CTO / programming whizz confessed to using a language he has no idea how to write himself (rust). Same!
Talking to a friend who works at a hyper-scaler, word on street is that they are concerned about value erosion from their platforms such as CRMs.
I would be too. Because we are living in an age that either by frontier model, dupe model, or open source model - its possible to (re) build platforms and applications into use cases that focus on value in your context. Creating organisational value, a degree of personalisation and business-specific use case benefits such as not been possible before.
The amuse-bouche's of this can be seen everywhere; such as Shopify and 37 Signals' decision to abandon cross-platform and webapps to complete native experiences, exploding application codebases and maintenance 2-5x. Why? To unlock the ultimate experience. The best experience.
Because ultimately, the unlock here is for the users. The effort to experience trade-off has now swung towards the users. Finally! The cost per unit of production of product is now favourable.
Never before has been understanding what users need and want been so important. Never before has exercising restraint on features been as impactful.
It's the era of the new paradigm; what is the use case? Where is the value-creation? How can we (re)build the tools (applications, tools, platforms, systems) to serve that.