I petition to rename "feature" as "complication" on software teams.

The question in the zeitgeist is whether coding agents will be to software engineers as the quartz revolution was to expert watchmakers.

Commoditized software is here. Will there be a market for high-end, luxury software? Becoming an artificially scarce veblen good is unlikely to work for digital goods the way it has for watches.

> "Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. But making the substantive differences between products disappear is what technology naturally tends to do. So what happened to the Swiss watch industry is not merely an interesting outlier. It's very much a story of our times."

Really interesting parallel between decidedly traditional technology and today.

Brand are brittle. It takes a single CEO associated to some pedophile network or make a nazi salute and it's ready to plummet.

If the business really mainly on the technical merits of the product/service, even blank brand is an option. Many brand as a façade to a single plant is a different tradeoff.

EconTalk from last month on the topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/fi/podcast/seiko-swatch-and-the-s...

Obviously not the main point, but I've been reading watch media online for over a decade now, I've read or heard this "Quartz Crisis" story hundreds of times and never ONCE read about the coincidence with the Bretton Woods agreement. Makes sense though, its basically oral history.

> One obvious lesson is to stay away from brand.

Wow, that is… not what I would recommend. Brand is one of the few things that will give you pricing power in the age of AI.

Also explains why German cars look the way they do today. Emphasizing the brand, so everyone can see it.

I expected this essay to end with a note about software's golden age.