[robbiemitchell]

This thread suggests Segment is anchored to their initial value prop for developers here[1]. To this crowd they seem to be more or less a one-way JS wrapper for websites that can later be replaced with a simple "logs to S3" instrumentation.

From my perspective as a "business ops" person, they graduated past this years ago and have unlocked a ton of value with identity normalization and server-side Track events, particular in moving data around between core product and the services marketing + sales use to acquire and engage customers.

Segment is the one place I can manually push an identity update or Track event and know it will be broadcast back to all the other endpoints, including a warehouse. In addition, the services I use also push their user activity back to Segment as a destination, which then automatically broadcasts it back out to everything else.

Asking product engineers to do all this work every time a new need pops up (a) literally never happens, and (b) if it does happen, drives them crazy because they hate working on that stuff and they'll never touch it again once v1 ships.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076