 |
|
|
|||||
Strategy textbooks taught us that sustainable competitive advantage that commanded premium prices was best protected by powerful barriers to entry. Build a moat, create switching costs, leverage access to high costs of entry, own distribution channels, and it would be difficult for startups to compete for your markets. But the forces of disruption operate by different rules, systematically destroying the very foundations of pricing power by making the previously difficult and expensive suddenly easy and cheap. The basis of competition changes, from excellence along well understood dimensions of merit to good enough. The ‘good enough’ revolution in pricing I have sympathy for incumbents. Theyre accustomed to working really hard to deliver on demanding criteria for quality, reliability, and excellence, only to find that fickle customers are spending their money on good enough that do just fine. Consider some examples: Peak book and the advent of e-readers. E-readers lack the tactile satisfaction of turning pages, the smell of paper, and the aesthetic appeal of a beautifully bound book, not to mention the satisfaction of having an author personally sign your copy (if the latter doesnt matter to you, please dont break my heart and tell me). Yet e-books offer instant delivery, the ability to carry thousands of books in one device, adjustable fonts, built-in dictionaries, and search functionality. For many readers, thats good enough. Further, Amazon can sell bestsellers for $9.99 because the marginal cost is near zero, undermining hardcover pricing power. And were now in a world where AI makes it easy for anybody to author a book, commoditizing the authority that being a book author used to convey. Digital Board Games vs. Physical Board Games. Electronic games lack the social ritual of gathering around a table, handling physical pieces, and reading opponents’ body language. But they enable play with friends anywhere in the world, handle all rules automatically, provide instant matchmaking with strangers, and eliminate setup/cleanup time. A $40 board game becomes a $5 app. Of course, there is a big debate about whether becoming subservient to the companies that want you to rent, rather than own, is a good thing or not. Streaming Fitness vs. Gym Memberships. Peloton, Apple Fitness+, and YouTube workouts can’t replicate the full equipment range of a commercial gym, the fine-tuning of a professional coach, or the energy of in-person classes. But they eliminate commute time, remove scheduling constraints, offer unlimited class variety, and provide privacy for self-conscious exercisers. A $30/month digital subscription undermines $150/month premium gym memberships for many users. In the industrial age, you could count on scarcity. It was hard to manufacture with quality at scale. It was hard to do advanced engineering. It was hard to source and assemble materials. For many of us, disruptors change the basis of competition entirely by removing the constraints that once justified premium pricing. The mechanics of price erosion Traditional pricing power rested on three pillars: scarcity, complexity, and friction. Companies could charge premiums because their offerings were hard to access, difficult to replicate, or cumbersome to replace. Disruptive technologies attack all three simultaneously. Take professional photography. The scarcity of skilled photographers, expensive equipment, and darkroom expertise once justified substantial fees. Smartphone cameras and AI-powered editing apps haven’t just reduced these coststhey’ve eliminated entire categories of photographic services. The wedding photographer still commands premiums, but passport photos, real estate listings, and product shots have been democratized beyond recognition. The financial services industry offers another compelling example. Robo-advisors now provide portfolio management that once required expensive human advisors. The algorithms aren’t more sophisticated than what top wealth managers offer, but they’ve made “good enough” portfolio management available for basis points instead of percentage points. When Charles Schwab can offer comprehensive financial planning for free as a customer acquisition tool, traditional advisors’ ability to charge 1-2% annually becomes increasingly tenuous. Strategic implications for incumbents In a world where technology makes everything easier and cheaper, competitive advantage increasingly comes from business model innovation rather than product superiority. Amazon Web Services doesn’t charge premiums because its infrastructure is superior; it dominates because it transformed computing from a capital expense to an operating expense, fundamentally changing how companies think about IT resources. The most successful responses involve three strategic moves. First, companies need to be open to unbundling their offerings, recognizing that customers will no longer pay premiums for features they don’t value. Second, they must shift from product-centric to ecosystem-centric thinking, finding new sources of value in sticky network effects and data rather than in the core product itself. Third, they must embrace the reality that in many categories, the price will trend toward marginal costwhich in digital goods means effectively zero. The new basis of competition As traditional pricing power erodes, new sources of competitive advantage emerge. Speed of innovation, ecosystem orchestration, and customer intimacy become more valuable than product features. Creating stickiness that makes it hard to switch, adding value to the experience and reinforcing new forms of scarcity perhaps embedded in algorithms are all powerful ways that digital firms sustain competitive advantage. Spotify, for instance, operates in a world where recorded music is effectively free. Its pricing power doesn’t come from exclusive content but from its recommendation algorithms, social features, and ecosystem integrations. The premium isn’t for the musicit’s for the experience around the music. And for artists, their revenue is increasingly coming from what is scarce the experience of attending a live performance. The bad news is that for many experts with years of investment in the old paradigms, the good enough revolution will make their experince less valuable. The good news is that democratizing who can create whats good enough can be a basis for massive growth.
Category:
E-Commerce
Spend a few minutes on developer Twitter and youll run into it: vibe coding. With a name like that, it might sound like a passing internet trend, but its become a real, visible part of software culture. Its shorthand for letting AI generate code from simple language prompts instead of writing it manually. In many ways, its great. AI has lowered the barrier to entry for coding, and thats pulled in a wave of hobbyists, designers, and side-project tinkerers who might never have touched a codebase before. Tools like Warp, Cursor, and Claude Code uplevel even professional developers, making it possible to ship something working in hours instead of weeks. But heres the flip side: when AI can move faster than you can think, its easy to run straight past the guardrails. Weve already seen how that can go wrong, like with the recent Tea app breach, which shows even polished, fully tested code can hide critical vulnerabilities if humans dont review it thoroughly. Optimizing for speed over clarity lets AI produce something that works in the moment, but without understanding it, you cant know what might break later. This isnt just technical debt anymore; its a risk to customer trust. The instinctive reaction to solve this trade-off is to throw more tech at the problem: add automated scans, add a secure by default setting. Those things matter. But Id argue that failure in vibe coding doesnt start with tooling, it starts with leadership. If you dont lead your team through this new way of working, theyll either move too slow to benefit from AI or move so fast they start breaking things in ways a security checklist cant save you from. The real job is steering, not slowing down When we built agentic coding agent Warp 2.0, we put a simple mandate in place: Use Warp to build Warp. That means every coding task started with prompting an AI agent. Sometimes it nailed it in one shot; sometimes we had to drop back to manual coding. But the point wasnt dogma, it was to force us to learn, as a team, how to work in an agent-driven world. We learned quickly that more AI doesnt automatically mean better. AI can write a thousand lines of plausible-looking code before youve finished your coffee. Without structure, thats a recipe for brittle, unmaintainable systems. The real challenge was getting people to treat AI-generated code with the same discipline as code they wrote themselves. Thats a leadership problem. Its about setting cultural norms and making sure they stick. Three things leaders need to get right 1. Hold developers accountable The biggest mental trap is treating the AI as a second engineer who owns what it wrote. It doesnt. If someone contributes code to a project, they own that code. They need to understand it as deeply as if they typed it out line by line. AI wrote it should never be an excuse for a bug. Leaders cant just say this once; they have to model it. When you review code, ask questions that make it clear you expect comprehension, not just functionality: Why does this query take so long to run? What happens if the input is null? Thats how you set the standard that understanding is part of shipping. 2. Guide AI with specifics Using large, one-shot prompts is like cooking without tasting as you go: sometimes it works, but usually its a mess. AI is far more effective when you request small, testable changes and review them step by step. Its not just about quality, it also builds a feedback loop that helps your team get better at prompting over time. In practice, this means teaching your team to guide the AI like theyd mentor a junior engineer: explain the architecture, specify where tests should live, and review work in progress. You can even have the AI write tests as it goes as one way to force smaller, verifiable units of work. 3. Build the review culture now In AI workflows, teams move fastest when AI and humans work side by side, generating and reviewing in small steps. The first draft of a feature is the most important one to get eyes on. Have someone review AI-generated work early and focus on the big-picture questions first, like whether its secure, reliable, and solves the right problem. The leadership challenge is making reviews a priority without slowing anyone down. Have teams aim to give feedback in hours, not days, and encourage finding ways for work to keep moving while reviews happen. This builds momentum while creating a culture that values careful, early oversight over rushing to get something done. Guardrails only work if people use them Safety tools and checks can help catch mistakes, but they dont replace good habits. If a team prioritizes speed over care, AI guardrails just get in the way, and people will find ways around them. Thats why the core of leading in the AI era is cultural: you have to teach people how to integrate AI into their workflow without losing sight of the fundamentals. The teams that get this right will be able to take advantage of the speed AI enables without bleeding quality or trust. The ones that dont will move fast for a while, until they ship something that takes them down. Vibe coding isnt going away, and I think thats a good thing. So long as teams lead with people, not just technology, they will come out ahead and create better experiences for users along the way.
Category:
E-Commerce
For its 2026 postage stamps, the U.S. Postal Service is going colorful and graphic. USPS gave a first look at some of the stamps set to be released next year, including the latest edition of its Love stamp, stamps commemorating the 250th anniversary of the U.S., and stamps depicting figures including a boxer, a martial artist and actor, and a pair of published poets. The stamps will be released on a rolling basis beginning in January and available at Post Office locations and online. This early preview of our 2026 stamp program underscores the Postal Services commitment to celebrating the artistry and storytelling that make stamps so special, Stamp Services director Lisa Bobb-Semple said in a statement. Each stamp is a small work of art an entryway into a larger story that connects people, places and moments in history.” [Image: USPS] Many of the stamps are bright or use typography in bold or creative ways. The 2026 Love stamps are a series of four illustrations of stylized red, white, and blue birds by illustrator James Yang that were inspired by midcentury U.S. design and Japanese children’s book illustrations, according to USPS. [Image: USPS] Stamps for Muhammad Ali designed by USPS art director Antonio Alcalá show an Associated Press photo of the boxer with his gloves up and his last name in big, all-caps, sans-serif type in red and black that evokes a boxing match promotional poster. [Image: USPS] A painting of Bruce Lee by artist Kam Mak shows the martial artist and actor against a yellow brushstroke background as he kicks the words “USA FOREVER” and “BRUCE LEE,” which were cleverly angled to look like he snapped them in two. [Image: USPS] For its “Figures of the American Revolution” stamps, multiple artists depict 25 people, from household name Founding Fathers like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin to lesser known figures as Deborah Sampson, the only woman to earn a military pension in the war after she dressed up like a man called Robert. The diverse selection of people were chosen to represent the Revolution as a collective effort, USPS says. “Its unusual to design a pane of stamps featuring 25 different portraits” USPS art director Ethel Kessler said in a statement. “But that number felt essential. How else could you begin to tell the story of the Revolutions complexity with fewer?” [Image: USPS] The typographic “Declaration of Independence” stamp also marks next year’s anniversary with “1776” written out in feather quill pens by typographer Juan Carlos Pagan. [Image: USPS] The “Lowriders” stamps pay homage to customized lowrider cars with photos by Philip Gordon and Humberto Beto Mendoza and gothic-style type paired with flourishes borrowed from lowrider paint jobs. Photographer David Schwartz contributed images for the “Route 66” stamps, which celebrate the 100th anniversary of the iconic highway. [Image: USPS] Other forthcoming stamps including “International Peace” showing an origami crane by Peace Crane Project founder Sue DiCicco, “Bald Eagle: Hatchling to Adult,” a pane of five stamps depicting the life of America’s national bird, and a stamp commemorating Colorado’s 150th anniversary. [Image: USPS] Writer Phillis Wheatley, who published what’s believed to be first book by a woman of African descent in the American Colonies, appears on the 49th Black Heritage stamp by artist Kerry James Marshall. Sarah Orne Jewett, a novelist and poet, appears on the 35th Literary Arts series by artist Mark Summers. Next year’s Lunar New Year stamp shows a horse mask by Sally Andersen-Bruce. [Image: USPS] USPS says more stamp announcements are forthcoming, and it’s also planning to rerelease an old stamp next year as part of its Stamp Encore Contest. [Image: USPS]
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||