But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race if you keep running; sales are easier if you are known as better; you get more informative feedback if you have more users, etc.
Dramatic statement. I am an SWE and an MBA. There are merits to thinking about every aspect of the business. Tech/Product is just one - an important one in a Saas company, but still just one.
> But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race if you keep running;
This is another way of saying "build it and they will come". You have to combine good business/economic sense with great products.
Apple didn't just get to be Apple by staying ahead in a technological race. Arguably, they are behind a lot of other phone makers in specs. But they have a lot of people thinking about ecosystems, lock-in, marketing and other "MBA" concepts.
This isn't a refutation of the parent - all you've said is that sometimes those dark patterns are worth exploiting. I'm rarely one for defending an absolute, so I think it would be far more interesting to say why it is worth using a 'dark pattern'. So far, it just feels like you're deflecting through masking the issue.
Those are not 'dark patterns', moreover, the notion of building a quality experience is not beyond MBA's either.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q="...
Their ability to exploit lock-in, to market well, to build an ecosystem have all derived from that original strength.
> But they have a lot of people thinking about ecosystems, lock-in, marketing and other "MBA" concepts.
People need to think about creating something of value that people want to use before they worry about locking them into an ecosystem.
As in, nothing vastly better has to be present.
Like figuring out how to make an AI that functions as a human-quality call center representative. It's not that there's a network effect or something, just that noone else can figure out how to do it without a tremendous investment.
That's more light than dark, right?
For example, there might be a smart search algorithm researcher who could make a better search engine than Google, if given access to their data. But without the data, it doesn’t matter how good their algorithms are, the search will be worse.
Googles moat is so good that it precludes the very existence of viable competing services. Is this a dark moat or a light moat?
So how do you explain the existence of viable competing services? Plenty of people have switched to DuckDuckGo and while it still has a tiny fraction of Google's market share it appears to be viable and growing. Microsoft still operates Bing. Again its market share is tiny but at this point I imagine they continue to operate it because it is somewhat viable and not just for strategic reasons.
The discussion of light vs dark patterns in this thread is more confusing than clarifying. Moats come in all shapes and sizes because a moat can pretty much be anything that satisfies the definition above; which doesn't preclude moats from frequently being of a certain kind(s).
While I would not argue that there are never arrangements in which centralization and support of monopolies may make some sense (e.g., to speed up coordination or make it easier to enforce regulations), there should probably be more consideration about the societal down sides of “economic moats”.
One interesting example for the economic and societal benefits of this “collaborative” kind of thinking could probabaly be the dutch health care provider buurtzog, which has been scaling like crazy but also seems to have been engaging with a variety of partners to actually help other people understand and replicate what makes buurtzog work. I bet that exchange was fruitful and interesting to both sides (there is always more to learn) but also premised on the idea that the primary goal of any business should be to help solve a problem and not to (primarily) defend its own existance. Encouragingly, both things generally correlate if done in the “right” order but it’s also hard work.
https://www.buurtzorg.com/collaboration/our-partners/
P.S. I know I am somewhat simplyfing here as there are certainly different phases in a businesses lifecycle where different trade-offs may be applicable. I am just commenting on a general mindset which seems to be pretty prevalent.
But it’s also a real danger to just thinking in absolutes like “the best product always wins” are also supremely context dependant. For every example there is always a counter example
Sometime as a sales or marketing person you are not really in control of the product, in these case these "dark" pattern are useful.