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by chatmasta 1834 days ago
I had this same reaction to next/image. I see where they're going with it though. They're obviously prioritizing e-commerce publishers because they tend to have high traffic, semi-static content, and a clear business use case for fast websites. They are also the most likely to pay Vercel to host their sites.

As long as features like next/image and "live" remain opt-in and don't otherwise affect build/dev times, I have no problem with Vercel targeting a lucrative market. Anyone who relies on Next should want Vercel to be a long-lasting company.

Besides, this is the first release of "live" – I can see this workflow becoming appealing to marketing and design teams. It's good practice to separate your marketing website from your application, so why not use "live" to enable non-devs to edit it? That's what Jamstack is all about – empowering the marketing/copywriting/product teams to edit content in real time. Maybe "live" is simply the next logical step of Jamstack – teams of non-devs editing the code and design of websites as easily as they can edit their content.

Developers should be all for that, even if they aren't the target audience of the live features. Reducing friction between dev and non-dev is a win for everybody. Marketers are happy because they can edit content without waiting on devs/deploys, and devs are happy because they talked the non-devs out of using WordPress, and got to build a new site with a hot technology.

I wonder if Vercel considers Automattic a competitor. The "percent of the web" stat is a juicy KPI to compete for.

2 comments

I personally can’t see any benefit of allowing non-devs near code. Personally, any time I’ve seen clients / non-devs near code (or non-content / admin / HTML / CSS type things) that’s when things go bad and I have have to fix things.

I’d be interested to see how this would work in practice but I’m skeptical at the moment.

> Anyone who relies on Next should want Vercel to be a long-lasting company.

Well said, +1. A feature that gets people excited about a product you use, even when you're not the intended audience, is a good thing.