The Silicon Valley playbook for the last few decades has just been to acquire monopolies and then exploit them.
That’s illegal of course but we stopped enforcing those laws somewhere in the early 2000s so here we are.
The Silicon Valley playbook for the last few decades has just been to acquire monopolies and then exploit them.
That’s illegal of course but we stopped enforcing those laws somewhere in the early 2000s so here we are.
And this is the continued path to "enshittification" we're on through the continued growth forever. Companies aren't buying products, they're buying customers.
I worked for PAN back in the days where the sentiment, directly from Nir Zuk (founder), was: innovators dilemma. There's a relatively recent article [0] on the early days that does a nice job of laying out how that was a core tenant of how PAN operated. At the time I was there Mark McLaughlin was leading the charge as CEO and was the right person to drive PAN to $100M ARR.
But as you see the company shift after Mark you really start to see less of an engineering mindset of bringing new and disruptive technology to the landscape. Nikesh doesn't know how to do that. He's an ex-Googler and a finance background to boot. PAN is no longer disruptive in the technical sense. They're now disruptive to fresh ideas and good technology, which is bad for everyone.
I work now in a segment that competes with PAN in a small niche of their product set and I've displaced their points solution dozens of times in the last year. The product we're displacing is a product that PAN acquired in early 2019. The customers on that platform constantly complain about how the product has not evolved in years and support at PAN is horrendous. The last point, support, used to be a shining light for PAN. They had exceptional support - but, as with all things, scaling high quality is hard. It's why you won't find an In-N-Out too far off the Pacific coast. It's because of quality and their commitment to it. PAN is chasing stock prices and revenue, they aren't committed to their customers as they once were.
[0] https://94040.substack.com/p/disruption-in-the-firewall-the-...
In-N-Out has a huge footprint in DFW btw. I agree with you on their commitment to quality but as I understand it their growth is slow because they don't take outside investment or loans and they need enough capital to open a regional footprint of stores because they do their own distribution.