[armchairhacker]

What I got from the essay: "brand is the only way to beat competition when you can't significantly beat them on quality". It's basically the market suffering from success. You can buy a cheap quality watch today.

For some product types there is no better alternative, like ISPs. But I'd argue this is because of monopoly, which is different from brand. Most monopolies (like ISPs) usually have negative brands, and there's no alternative not because one can't create a better brand (that's easy), but because the upfront cost to become profitable is too high.

[hammock]

So the cutting edge things are happening in places where brand doesn’t matter. I could think of better examples but moldbot/clawdworld comes to mind. Or ASML, or national lab physics, or cheap attack drones, or.. idk can anyone think of better examples?

And “brand age” (as a broad moniker) is another way of saying innovation has stagnated.

[armchairhacker]

OpenClaw is an exception to your list. It’s easy to spin up an OpenClaw alternative (you can even fork it), but not clear how to significantly improve its function. You may argue that name recognition (what OpenClaw relies on today) is separate from brand; but if a competitor becomes popular (perhaps by offering slightly better security), unless OpenClaw can make a significant functional improvement (like better OpenAI integration, since OpenAI hired its creator), the only way I can imagine it regaining market is via brand.

[widowlark]

innovation has stagnated because businesses have driven us to stagnation. Very few businesses provide any real value - the ones that do are running circles around everyone else - given the lack of ability, businesses turns to other, less useful methods of prying our money away from us and largely succeed because consumers are gullible and malleable.

[danielparsons]

ah the classic "most people are mere sheep, unlike us Great Minds"

[Bridged7756]

Where did you get that from that comment?. It seems clear to me that it was meant were all consumers.

[widowlark]

yes, thank you - I did mean to include myself in the 'customers' category, apologies if it came off as holier-than-thou

[widowlark]

apologies if my comment came off this way, it was not intended. I think all consumers (myself included!) are vulnerable to being swayed by commercial propaganda

[KaiserPro]

Apart from the issue is omega (swatch group) has 3x the turnover of patek.

The other part of the story is swatch is also quite successful at the shit tier watches as well.

So this article misses the point really.