The Brand Age
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Branding is not inherently unproductive, nor is it guaranteed to produce worse watches. They may be larger and less accurate, but consumers still (evidently) find value in the brand. A Grand Seiko or a Nomos or a Patek is perhaps now even more interesting & identity-productive than a watch was in the 60s.
As technologists I think we're prone to dismissing improvements that aren't engineering-backed. But all life is storytelling, and labeling that work as "button-pushing" is… dismissive, to say the least.
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.
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.
And “brand age” (as a broad moniker) is another way of saying innovation has stagnated.
Do we as humans feel more at ease with our identity/purchases buying a brand which is known by other people because it spends billions on it/ or a niche brand/smaller shop which is more authentic but people don't know about it.
To me, it feels like the david vs goliath story. My intuition says a mix of small but not too small / something which has history that you compromise on like support/quality of product etc. and sometimes price efficacy.
I do not want notifications buzzing on hand either. That is what the phone is for. I have a phone too, really, it is always next to me.
Most stuff, sure, but probably not -
> heart rate monitoring
So as someone who is cantering through middle age to a point in life close to where males in my family in older generations have experienced atrial fibrillation and other heart problems, having a heart rate monitor built into my watch that is capable of spotting early signs of this stuff is pretty cool. Having it (crudely) monitor blood oxygen lets me know that for all I snore, I don't seem to have terrible sleep apnea, and I'm considering an upgrade to one that does blood pressure too.
I know this is going to be of limited interest to the young, but these devices becoming more widespread is likely very helpful to an older cohort like myself (I'm 47), making them 'just part of the package' with smart watches puts this sort of health monitoring and information in reach for a lot of people who would otherwise probably not be interested in wearing an ugly medical device, and whose first sign of trouble might be a fibrillation episode or falling asleep at the wheel.
I've got the Aktiia/Hilo band and I'd recommend it if you're wanting to keep vague[0] track of your 24/7[0] blood pressure. Needs calibrating every couple of weeks against the band but that's not an onerous procedure[1][2].
(Probably worth getting a cheapo monitor as a secondary check though - I've got a Renpho bluetooth one.)
[0] It only really takes measurements when you're not "moving" and that can be "running around", "jumping up and down", "typing furiously", etc. which does lead to gaps and only 3-4 measurements every 2 hour slot. Also their app is a bit rubbish and they don't have a decent export story - if you want more than their "daily average → Health", you need BPExtract to OCR the monthly PDF reports (which you have to request by hand, BTW!)
[1] Protip! DO NOT drop the band onto its on/off switch because it's fragile and will BORKEN itself. Mine got stuck in the on position but I've subverted the problem by sticking a magnetic MicroUSB end into the charging point[3] - applying power kicks it into charging mode and removing it leaves it in "ready to use" mode for 5-10 minutes which is more than enough for standard calibrations and testing.
[2] Although their new "BP via the camera and finger" doesn't work AT ALL for me. Almost never gets a reading.
[3] Which I've started doing for all MicroUSB devices because I've somehow managed to snap off 3 MicroUSB ports internally. Shoddy workmanship.
But I was hoping that would be an updated Apple watch, as I have an 8 at the moment that does the other stuff :)
That said I understand that the BP measurements on smart watches are pretty execrable. Thanks for the info!
Yeah, I think that might come in the future but it's probably a patent minefield[0]. That said I think Ringconn mentioned that they were looking at implementing it for their smart rings in the "near future" - who knows?
[0] There's also the "calibration against the smart cuff" step which I'm guessing any solution would need and that's probably a whole other FDA/patent minefield. Also tricky to have to sell a watch model with a required cuff and have to disable the BP functionality on watches that don't have a matched cuff. You can imagine the HN headlines...
We? Maybe? Maybe not? Me? Yes, 100% Well, except Snapchat.
(Pro tip: Try not using your experience and desires as a guide/requirement for the larger populace - you'll feel a lot better about the world and yourself when you get the hang of it.)
> Anything else I can do with my phone or laptop.
The heart rate monitoring? Not nearly as accurate using a phone camera as a wrist-mounted multi-LED watch. Also I tend not to have my finger over my phone camera with a heartrate app running 24/7 - I find it gets in the way of actually using my phone for other stuff.
I have no idea what these brands sell and I give it so much importance I won't even bother make a search.
To my mind, this is a lose lose game. Society at large is being engaged into wasteful goals, and as all means are going to be useful in the game where all that matter is displaying more personal material whealths, general social outcomes are undermined: first bribery, then use of other mental coercion tools, then threats, then bare physical aggressions.
>As technologists I think we're prone to dismissing improvements that aren't engineering-backed.
No that's not about technology and engineering blindness. Technologies of course can serve best interests of general public and humanity at large. Or a improve efficiency of genocide. And social engineering can be used either to create isolation and hate between groups, or spread more solidarity, diversity being loved where it's open to reciprocal appreciation of differences, and many other virtuous bounds beyond local groups.
Not all life is story telling. Behind, there are real people with actual suffering and joys that goes beyond what even the most eloquent narrator can convey.
This word scares me because if identity is dependent on the type of product that you have or becomes larger part than it already is, especially within my generation at times. Then its quite scary to think.
A gaping hole of loneliness being filled with shallow identity being generated by and for consumerism.
As much as I think that what you meant was products alleviating the identity of the person, I think the chances of the identity itself being replaced by something more hollow is more likely as well.
Quite frankly,This word truly feels like something which comes out of American Psycho or reminds me so much of it.
Also, another point but I also feel the same feelings of hollowness from creating stuff with AI if we leave it autonomously as I mentioned with some aspect of consumerism although I am frugal. The similarities are quite a lot.
Money --> (Choice on what prompt/model you want your identity more associated with) --> (time) --> Product
Money --> (Choice on what product you want your identity more associated with) --> (time) --> product
And then repeat the cycle.
This has been a boom for capitalism but a loss for humanity, in my opinion.
For instance:
> Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear.
I think, for better and worse, brands are a lot more than that.
Brands at least start out as a designation of quality, but in modern society, they're an important part in companies avoiding legal liability, and having more distributed supply chains.
Nike couldn't be the global brand it was today if it directly managed all its factories. Modern brands are a part of the economic landscape that is fundamental for making the kind of distributed supply chains that allow globalisation to be possible.
I think the essay mixes brands a little with conspicuous consumption, which can also happen without brands, like with artists or jewels. Its just that brands are so ever present, its not always obvious to see these examples.
So yeah, we definitely are in "the brand age", but brands definitely aren't non-functional at all. The world really would operate very differently without them.
It's still gross, obvious, and in bad taste.
> Nike couldn't be the global brand it was today if it directly managed all its factories.
I'm speculating now, but it seems really likely if that type of distributed supply chain didn't exist, we'd see a closer coupling of design and manufacturing (at an extreme end factories designing and producing their own product).
That outsourcing of manufacturing has let US companies like Nike and Apple stay dominant in the design field, despite almost all their manufacturing being carried out by Asian companies.
Ultimately the global economy is very complicated, but a lot of it is predicated on that design/manufacturing split, which is only enabled by distributed manufacturing contracted out by brands.
I'm not trying to argue any of this is good/bad, but just that the concept of a 'brand' plays a huge function in determining what the world economy looks like, and isn't an empty concept.
It's true that branding gains importance as a differentiator when the product moves towards being a commodity or if its innovation has reached its peak . But I disagree that it's always the driving factor for how a company is structured.
There are some industries where the franchise model is most dominant (eg fast food chains) and some others where tight control over the value chain is the norm (eg apple). And funnily enough, one of the distinctive differentiators those luxury swiss watchmakers have, is: "We make every part ourselves. Everything is manufactured in Switzerland.". Then you have the OG multinational companies like P&G or Unilever, where branding definitely plays an important role but a lot of their brands are regional so it's yet another structure.
I really think it's mainly the specific industry and geopolitics that shape supply chains and not the branding.
> I'm speculating now, but it seems really likely if that type of distributed supply chain didn't exist, we'd see a closer coupling of design and manufacturing (at an extreme end factories designing and producing their own product).
It's an interesting question. I think it's safe to say that the main driver to outsource manufacturing was cost. But nowadays companies also benefit from things like reduced accountability. Even if we assume every part of the supply chain could be done within the US, wouldn't companies like Apple still eventually outsource the ugly parts of the supply chain to some third party within the US? Simply for the appearances.
This isn't brand; this is legal company structure. Brand is "what people think of when they hear the word Nike".
Otherwise, individual manufacturing companies, don't have the financial incentive to give companies like Nike as big a portion of the profits as they do. Currently that system works, because the brand association of "Nike" gives people some kind of status/quality-assurance/whatever that they are happy to pay for.
Of course a company can structure itself fully aligned with its brand: I start Philip's Tyre Repair and the brand is 1:1 with the company and the premises. I don't see why being able to do that is important to enforce.
The point is, particularly with somewhere like Nike, that they have all sorts of things they need to do (advertise shoes; design shoes; make shoes; move shoes; sell shoes to retailers) that not all of it needs to be branded as Nike particularly. Only really the advertise shoes is the "brand".
It's like how Red Bull outsource basically everything except advertising. Someone else makes the drinks; someone else moves them; someone else sells them. They just maintain a really good brand with advertising, including innovative stuff like X-games.
There is a great quote about this:
"For things that are visible to other people when you use them, there are many brands. e.g clothes, cars, watches, skis, furniture etc
For things that are not visible, there are much fewer brands e.g. underwear.
Nobody cares what brand your underwear is because its hidden.
Such products are usually fewer brands because what matters is a huge chain supply. You most likely buy it if its available retail or not, you don't go look at an ad and say, wow I want that brand but the idea is to make familiar with it.
But even if you aren't. There are just so few brands with supply chain directly to retails that such things usually end up getting centralized and convenience of buying is the largest factor. You want to drive less to get this stuff whereas you might go far away just to get a nice pair of shirt and jeans for example something which, again has to do with the visibility of the product/social stigma
Technically, the supply chain thing also directs itself to products like cole drinks for example. You are probably drinking coke/pepsi because its available everywhere and usually the choice that you see in different drinks is just some permutation of a drink/brand which is owned by the parent company (coke/pepsi). The amounts of brands owned by pepsi/coca cola are quite a lot to be honest.
I thought lots of restaurants behind-the-scenes either got food from external suppliers either in part or all the way to ghost kitchens.
Personal care products - shampoos, soaps, lotions
Nutritional supplements
are counterexamples
This seems likely accurate; but you know, I enjoy reading intelligent people work things out from first principles in their own voice.
Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?) and, of course, there are lines outside "luxury" brands like Louis Vuitton. Why bother?
PS I'll stick to my Casios: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/06/the-discreet-charm-of-infrastru...
ego, of course
This is so silly. Do you really not have any hobbies where you spend inordinate time or money on things you could objectively accomplish quicker and cheaper, but having less fun, in other ways? Like, I ski. It’s a silly way to get up and down a hill in the 21st century.
I’m not a watch guy. But mechanical watches are beautiful. There are idiots who buy them. But that doesn’t mean everyone who does is an idiot.
Sure. To each their own. I drive a Subaru. I don’t think it’s weird that others like a nice car. (I also think there are douchebags who drive both.)
A watch at $80,000 is what, 10,000x what a new cheap one is?
But good for them! It’s really hard to be angry at them for buying said watch without it being some form of jealousy.
At least with cars or audio equipment there's some marginal benefits once you get to crazy numbers, not the case with watches.
This describes precisely zero watch enthusiasts I know. Each of them can open up the watch and understand what's happening. In one case, he'll disassemble the major components to clean them. (Analogous to how riders can take care of their horses and gear, or I can tune and wax my skis.)
Your dismissal could be just as accurately be applied to the various programming languages many of us learn for fun. We don't know how to write its compiler. We can barely do anything useful in it. We just play with it while a technologically-superior version would take a fraction of the effort.
> There's also no natural shortage of them, they can make a trillion of these watches
Quartz? Obviously. Aegler/Rolex? Probably. Handmade movements? No.
> At least with cars or audio equipment there's some marginal benefits once you get to crazy numbers, not the case with watches
As an enthusiast of neither cars nor watches, I call total bullshit on this comparison. Anyone arguing they're getting utility out of their Ferrarri, Pagani, Omega or Audemars is full of themselves.
This status-through-martyrdom ritual to get it from retail at MSRP is utterly bizarre.
[1] https://www.chrono24.com/patekphilippe/nautilus--mod106.htm
I feel bad for the folks who pick up on stuff like this, that must be a heavy weight to bear constantly comparing yourself to other people.
A classic case is when you observe teenager targeted status signalling trends. This can be as low value as an expensive shirt, ie shirts branded ‘supreme’ costing $300 which isn’t worth signalling to anyone who pays rent or a mortgage. But to a teenager? Wow man $300! such status!!! On the flip side if we see someone above teenager age wearing such teenager targeted status symbols we reasonably subconsciously assume they live with their parents and have very little income.
This continues up the wealth chain forever. Status symbols are invariably a way to see just how little people actually have because the person wearing the status symbol clearly believes the value of what they are flaunting is impressive.
Status symbols aren’t a signal of how much money you have so much as signal of what you believe to be an incredible amount of wealth to flaunt.
half a million for a car sounds absurd to me, but it's 0.5% of $100M. Compare that to $50k car on a ~$200k median net-worth US household.
The old money drives beat-up cars (often Swedish made, US imports for enthusiasts, or old-style 4x4s for outdoor pursuits) and are more likely to take taxis. Young, highly-educated BoBo types walk, take transit or cycle.
Just-above-poor neighbourhoods have a much higher proportion of flash cars than rich ones.
You can have that heavy weight while living on the suburbs or even the ghetto too. The objects are prices mostly change with the wealth level, not the game.
If you're comfortably middle class and in a demographic recognized to "deserve" to be middle class, then you can afford to be oblivious to a whole lot of class signaling. You aren't striving to reach a higher station, and you aren't likely to get demoted out of your current one, so you can mostly ignore it.
People that are lower-class and trying to move up, or in demographic categories that are often shunned access to higher social classes don't have that luxury and are incentivized to be savvy to this kind of stuff.
This is one of the kinds of things that people talk about when they talk about "privilege". It's not that you should feel bad because you don't have to worry about this stuff. It's just an acknowledgement that some people have the privilege of not having to worry about this stuff because they were born into a level of class security that others lack.
They might pass the time doing those things, but not as a mere passtime or hobby, like if they were sewing or playing CoD. Unlike those, doing them and telling about doing them serves a specific social purpose.
But I don't view hobbies as that separate from status signals within the hobbying group. Oh you play games? What games? Did you beat it? etc etc.
Esoteric knowledge/practices here are status signls (Oh you reached shattered planet without xyz??).
That starts to sound a lot like "Oh you aquired a lambo XYZ without usual steps abc" and that's a really fun convo in the in-group, and a total miss with the out-group.
The difference though is that this is not meant to serve "within the hobbying group".
They serves the status signal purpose when showing them to "laymen" and other rich people in general, not necessarily to other expensive car buyers or luxury watch buyers.
In other words, the, typically quiet, flaunting, is done to people otherwise uninterested about the specific ting, that nonetheless recognize the exclusivity and the knowledge that it's a subtle signal of "elevated taste" and that they belong to the tasteful-rich club.
(Well, the way that _some_ people play Magic: The Gathering does - but I wouldn't want to play with anyone who raised a stink about proxies)
Some of just like to do things, and to attain status by doing things well, rather than by bragging about our ability to cheat.
EDIT: to put it a different way - all tales of "skipping the line" are an integral part of that hobby; but not all hobbies involve, and not all hobbyists enjoy, tales of "skipping the line". And; every tale of "skipping the line" is status signalling, but not every status signal is such a tale.
As for fonts etc: https://hobancards.com/blogs/thoughts-and-curiosities/americ...
This could be explained away by them working for the same place and assuming to contact them you call the same switchboard and ask for the person, but even back in the 90s it would have been strange for wall street "Vice Presidents" (even if it was somewhat of a ceremonial title) to not have their own unique business number.
Also, Paul Allen giving his card to someone else with the same contact number for the purposes of being in touch to plan to play squash doesn't make much sense unless you get meta and assume Paul Allen was aware this had no practical value and just wanted to ego-drop the card.
Remember that _American Psycho_ is repeatedly hinting to you throughout the movie that most, or even all, of what you see is just Bateman's own delusions and hallucinations, which are inferior imitations of reality due to his own impoverished mind and lack of substance. So there's a lot of little tricks all throughout it to subtly destabilize you: https://www.moviemaker.com/american-psycho-anniversary-oral-...
And this is how I feel about recent few pg's essays. There is this new market, political and social reality, that pg decribes well but for some reason just doesn't want to call what it is.
Apart from the KYC aspect of the process it's their way of solving the problem of artificial scarcity on the second-hand market as the article explains. They want a second hand market to exist to indicate that this is a luxury item, but too many and the price tanking with excess supply.
Lines outside Louis Vuitton are more down-market, aspirational luxury - an ultra-wealthy person wouldn't be caught dead queuing on a sidewalk. Patek and Ferrari operate at the level above, where the signal isn't wealth but access. (HBS calls Ferrari's version "deprivation marketing.")
Is it a game worth bothering with? Enough people think so to sustain billion-dollar brands.
(Of course, PG writing an essay about being too smart for fancy watches - while knowing a lot about them - is its own signaling game, just aimed at a different audience)
Stealthy, like a submarine.
Not sure if that's the truth or clever marketing by purveyors of luxury goods, but it changes the wealth signaling dynamics of fancy watches if it is.
Maybe he meant second-hand though? If someone else has already taken the 'used' depreciation on a watch, the 'art' added value on the gold price, then yes I think it's probably fair to say they hold their residual value better than a lot of things that continue to depreciate.
Expensive watches are way closer to bitcoins than useful assets. They inherently rely on the gullibility of other rich prick wanna be's. Still a good bet probably.. sadly..
So you likely won't get rich day-trading (or even collecting) watches, but besides the initial capital investment it is not as irrational as it seems at first.
Of course, that only adds to the signaling power for the classes where merely having money isn't enough, and being a "savvy investor" is a status marker (ie. the upper-middle and nouveau riche).
The Patek Nautilus PG mentions is particularly interesting as a status symbol as it has not only held value but, for various reasons, been an outlier that has appreciated drastically in value. It'd be gauche even on Sand Hill Rd to wear a hat that says "My investments beat the S&P 500" — but for the last few years, flashing a Nautilus (~413% investment return from 2016-2026 vs ~322% in the S&P) is the equivalent of that, a self-reinforcing cycle boosting its value as a Veblen good where the high price is the point.
There’s a great number of people with 100+M and even far beyond that who enjoy nobody knowing just what kind of wealth they have. This doesn’t mean looking poor, but there’s plenty of value in anonymity.
Rich and anonymous is where it's at.
Having the most expensive item in some category, or close to it, often gets you news coverage, which is something a normal purchase can't really offer.
The most shocking aspect here is the mindset of these people that come to value this access, and the fact that they have to have their own self-perceived worth at some lower (i.e. improvable) level in comparison. It has to be, otherwise the value of that access can't make much sense, otherwise that association to a brand (as chosen not chooser) can't be perceived as something of value. The only (sane) question worth asking, knowing that about the people falling into this game is - do I want to count myself as one of them?
You could differentiate based on your personality. It costs nothing at all, and is far more interesting than a trinket.
Strive to be Warren Buffet, not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
So you're saying that everyone seeks status, and even the people who say they don't are seeking status by not seeking status? That argument seems like you are overreaching. What, then, would you consider evidence that falsifies your theory?
As for falsification: you'd need evidence like subjects showing no well-being drop (self-esteem, cortisol) from lab-induced status demotions, or entire cultures genuinely indifferent to respect. Neither holds up in the data: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25774679/
John Adams put it well in Discourses on Davila (1790): "The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger — and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe a pain as the gout or stone."
He was aiming at people like the people commenting on this thread and who read the essay.
Also to the startup/entrepreneur founder-types that are actually interested in building a business that makes a qualitative improvement in the market that it works in.
But mechanical watches are very appealing to nerd/geek types as well, purely in terms of the design and engineering of the movements and the precision of the manufacture.
Complications are absolutely pointless, but making a movement that can deliver them is very appealing.
What a tired aphorism. Just like PG's 50 year old insights.
I've got three Oceanus watches (Casio's boutique brand). I never wear them, anymore, because of Apple Watch.
I brought a couple of them in Japan. There, the G-Shock brand is very popular. They sell G-Shock watches for ridiculously (to Americans, who are used to cheap G-Shocks) high prices.
From a birds-eye view it's less a hedonistic treadmill and more a feeding frenzy.
It's a game you can play, but for the life of me, I cannot comprehend why you'd want to, there are so many other better things in life.
>>> Why bother?
Exactly - go give someone you love a hug, that's worth infinitely more than flexing an expensive watch.
Hugs are massive signals of status (who, where, initiator, awkwardness, yada yada).
My fascination with the politics of hugs might be called autistic by some.
I wonder whether my own status avoidance is on account of being bad at playing at ladders.
It's called relationship-based allocation or more simply purchase history requirement, and its practiced by both Patek and Rolex but add to the list famously Hermes, Bugatti, high jewelry from VCA/Bulgari etc, getting access to prestigious artists at galleries, etc.
The devil's advocate/ other side of the coin is that it's not just a moneygrab, it protects the brand image by controlling who is seen wearing / using your products. When the value of these goods is so influenced by who else has them, that kind of control is intrinsically important for the seller.
pg dr. This is the answer. A pg article is clickbait at best, harmful at worst. Keep in mind this is the same man who chose to write his antiwokeness hit peace right at the cusp of the election.
P.S.: It is odd to me to have such a length pg essay been up for such a long time with just a handful of comments. Did something happen? I would've expected a wealth of discussion on a post like this by now.
Pardon; your theory is that this attitude was prevalent among people who like discussing pg's writing, and that they have left in favour of a new crowd that doesn't care about pg but is also pro- the AI companies?
... Because that doesn't seem to line up with the general tenor of discussion in threads about AI companies doing things.
> But you could recognize one from across the room.
and
> Or maybe not so lucky.
and starting a paragraph with
> For men, at least.
It pains me to think how simplistic some peoples' LLM writing detection heuristics are (or at least appear to be). Prose such as in TFA is really obviously human-written to me. It's using those choppy sentences properly. It doesn't strike me as "less well-written" at all; the resulting contrast is clearly very intentional.
Although, of course, what you describe is still a couple levels above "Behold, what doth mine Ctrl-F espy but U+2014 EM DASH! Hie thee hence, O wretched automaton!"
yeah they were force merged with ETA, longines, Hamilton and eterna, which basically dominated the swiss watch industry .
Patek Phillipe was all about just being expensive with other people's movements. They were the balenciaga of watches (subjective view point there.)
They are not really in the education business anymore — they're in the exclusivity and signaling business
- Complication creep
- Complication-complete
- Complication requests
Surely this cannot exist.
The ability to transfer a lot of money in the physical shape of brand watches costing 200k per piece may have added to their appeal. AppleTV’s show Friends and Neighbours upselling their value as Jon Hamm tries to steal them from neighbours may be product placement. But these were all tactics from the 50s and 60s where relatively few media sources meant you could buy your way into the hearts of the masses with an ads campaign.
Today we have a massively accelerated pace of society burning through fads and information - largely due to social media. The artificial scarcity trick is no longer an MBA secret. A brand, especially an AI brand, can burn in and out of favor in days. Transparency in society helps maybe bring out authenticity. Advertising of the past was often “advertising to your weaknesses” and that game is over.
If we can structure the transparency and apply it to politicians and other less transparent institutions that count on “Brand” to the list (especially ones with high margins and large networks) maybe the world will see true competition that benefits everyone more. Lack of transparency (and liqidity, and availability) are what make trust bubbles that distort markets.
It's not quite 'necessity' being the mother of invention, but perhaps desire.
Not sure about Belgian potato or watch branding.
Those were illegal beer brewers in Belgium! Women would put their pointy hat on their door as a sign that there might be, if you ask nicely, some beer for you to buy there.
Flying was having its golden age around the times of Concorde and 747, coffee bars were great when Starbucks reinvented the 3rd place and social media was cool when it just came out
It very much relates to that Steve Jobs clip about what happens when the marketing people take over the company
Cafes and coffee places are still great, Starbucks did for them what McDonalds did for food. They're a known standard of quality. It might be low, but it's known. Starbucks didn't invent the 3rd place, or re-invent it.
As jobs moved from manufacturing to services, more people were able to work in a way that the "3rd place" offers. The ultimate extension of that is WFH.
The actual planes are much better today than in the "golden age ... of Concorde and 747", what ruined it was the security theater as a result of 9/11, and the race to the bottom of the service offerings.
Business classes (especially international and Asian airlines) is much much better, economy has more services (individual entertainment, USB, power etc), better seats, but much worse seat pitches, and nickel-and-diming every item possible (ticket transfers/changes, luggage, seat selection, meals, etc).
So not so much "Brand Age" for air travel, it's more a stratification.
Although if what I learnt from QI is to be believed[0], the internal air quality is now much worse than when smoking was allowed because they don't recycle the air through filters as much (if at all) these days.
[0] I believe they're about 90% reliable with their "wacky" facts.
Airbus 350 and Boeing 777 have much better air, higher pressure than older planes.
For me, partly because I don't want to be seen as showing off and partly because I feel like if you want me to advertise your brand then you should be paying me, not the me paying you.
And, once noticed, it's on so many products I wish it wasn't. The sink in my bathroom says "Sterling" as does my toilet. The saddles (seats) on my two bicycles have their name on them. So do the front forks on one. One that's most silly to me, the tires have huge branding but the actual useful info, what pressure they need, is nearly impossible to read without perfect lighting and then me taking a photo and zooming in.
My phone holder, basket holder, rear racks, and pannier are all branded. My toaster oven, rice cooker, electric kettle, stove, refrigerator, even the garbage disposal has it's name stamped into the top visible part. All my casual shoes have a visible exposed tag at a minimum. Fortunately dress shoes don't but I rarely have a chance to wear those.
My computer case, my monitor, my hub, my KVM, my laptop holder, my headphones, my mouse, they're all advertising their brand at me.
I'd be fine if it's in some hidden area (inside the fridge, under the rice cooker, under the laptop holder, etc...) but ultimately I'd prefer no branding. But, there just aren't any choices. Most people either want to show off the brand they bought or they don't care. Few are like me that would prefer no visible branding. And so you can't get unbranded things (or I can't)
Also I have a related point on consumerism. A lot of things don't really need a brand to begin with because there is little need for so many options. Like if you have to advertise your brand identity to me to have your product be a success, I generally assume your product is a solution in search of a proper problem. (Yes often they do solve problems, but I will argue many modern day problems are bullshit/fake.)
For HN, macs are a good example. You can remove all the apples and we’ll recognize the laptop.
My Triumph motorcycle has a similar property. You could remove all the logos (there’s just 2 stickers anyway) and even my girlfriend who is not into bikes will recognize it by the engine sound alone.
Kitchenaid and Smeg appliances have a similar property. BBC hides all the logos and you can still recognize the standup mixers in their baking shows.
One of the core company design principles was to have minimal branding. The phone design had no logo. When you show it to people they are looking for the identifier and it's completely missing. When you are in a market where most of the products look largely the same, branding is very important.
It's unfortunate, but absolutely necessary.
> One obvious lesson is to stay away from brand. Indeed it's probably a good idea not just to avoid buying brand, but to avoid selling it too.
It's perfectly healthy to use brand as a heuristic to help yourself more easily buy products that work well.
Seems related to me.
You can buy this Prada keychain, only $525!
https://www.prada.com/us/en/p/saffiano-leather-keychain/2PP0...
Or you can buy some other that will be just as functional
https://www.etsy.com/search?q=keychain+leather+black+triangl...
But not advertise your $$$$.
Maybe a better example: Is this $2950 Prada bag
https://www.prada.com/us/en/p/re-nylon-and-saffiano-leather-...
Any better than 1000s of < $100 bags? It's not more durable. It's not going to last longer. It's not going to carry more or less stuff. You can find 100s of not 1000s of bags who if you slapped a Prada tag on would be considered just as stylish (meaning if you did a double blind test and either put the logo on both or removed it from both, no one would tell which was which)
> It's perfectly healthy to use brand as a heuristic to help yourself more easily buy products that work well.
Sure, though I know lots of people that assume expensive = quality and confuse that with expensive brand = quality. It doesn't. The chintziest items I've owned have been expensive "high end" brands. That's not to say all expensive brands are bad. Only that expensive well known brand only means they're good at marketing. It does not mean their product are quality. They might be, they might not.
To me, a product with no visible brand at all feels like a drive by operation that shouldn't be taken seriously. You can see this all over, nice cutlery will always have a brand stamped in the metal, while cheap junky stuff will be unbranded since it's sold on price rather than quality and trust.
Sadly, the writing isn't there for (only) you. Anywhere you go and park your car now has a billboard for the tire company. Far more eyeballs that interest the ones putting the writing on it will be looking at it for reasons other than looking for the pressure than ones who are actually trying to get anything done with them.
1. You don't find a golden age by looking for interesting problems. You find it by solving customer problems, even if they're boring.
2. Luxury watches, or anything luxury or fashion, are almost by definition using brand for status signaling. That's a business where you don't control your destiny but jump in front of the crowd.
The most important thing about brand is that it reduces the information costs of reliance, which only gets more important as customer reliance is deeper and more complicated. Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Netflix, McDonalds, Halliburton, even Berkshire: they're somewhat distinguished by quality, but mainly get their premiums by their reliability at serving complicated needs.
(Indeed, the problem with the beautiful luxury mechanical watches is that they require good care and maintenance - high cost of reliability. Quartz watches just work, reducing the market for mechanicals to status symbols.)
This is (yCombinator's) golden age because software/ai and devices/(mainly Arm, somewhat robots) now can reach many more customer needs. But being reliable means marriage: lifelong devotion to this one problem. Already taken: the transferable-skill opportunities of general-purpose computers, frameworks and infrastructure, consumer internet and cloud compute. Now available: small and complex niches.
I think it's tempting to be equally dismissive of branding and fashion because they are both forms of virtue signaling and therefore have all its perversions. However, they're operating on different actors. Branding is virtue signaling by companies to its customers. Fashion is virtue signaling by customers to other people.
In an age of planned obsolescence, cost reduction and cheap materials, something that's known for being well made has a lot of value.
> ... Is there some edifying lesson we can salvage from the wreckage? ... One obvious lesson is to stay away from brand. ... Sure, you might be able to make money this way ... but pushing people's brand buttons is just not a good problem to work on ...
> Go where interesting problems are, and you'll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they'll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.
But I know a lot of people who wear watches for different reasons. Some people's idea of "brand" is the frugality of the F-91W. Some people wear obnoxiously large watches. Some people go for something more classy and subtle.
And then there's a great deal of difference in taste. Some watches are works of art. Some are made of wood. Some are full of diamonds.
I think a lot of these niches are underserved, and so your brand can be "the one that owns this niche."
Really interesting parallel between decidedly traditional technology and today.
This is a wild thing to say. Brand age watches don't look strange. They look beautiful. Incredible thought and care and intention is put into their design. The people who buy them love them. It's so funny to me to get this far into one of PGs blogs and sort of realise "Oh right, you don't actually understand beauty". It's very hard to read this as much more than a slightly autistic man not understanding that it's ok for people to like beautiful things. It is not worth it to me to spend £100k on a watch, but I don't deny it is to other people, I'm not going to pretend the watch is undesirable.
But it does make me wonder whether Paul things that YC is successful today because it has a better design than other startup programmes, or is it successful today because of it's brand?
They don’t possess a universal, objectively valuable beauty that motivates the desire. If they did, fakes would be equally desireable and they are not.
Can you reflect on why they think those designs are more beautiful than others?
But here - https://spechtandsohne.com/product-category/icon-quartz/
And they are pretty popular with folks who like watches.
Culture shapes our taste. Companies go on multi-decade billion-dollar campaigns to shape our culture. We like certain things because famous actors or athletes endorse them; because hip hop artists rap about them; because influencers talk about them; because Hollywood portrays them a certain way. This extends to all modern aesthetic preferences from architecture to watches to cars to furniture to dating.
I think the argument pg is making is that brand-obsessed cultures are not maximally truth/beauty-seeking and gets really weird. e.g. Japanese Ohaguro, Chinese foot binding, various cranial deformation practices from the Mayans to the Huns, high-heels, ugly (to outside observers) watches.
It's a really thought-provoking essay. But it's too heterodox and "autistic" to share with most of my friends. Socially speaking, it's best to outwardly embrace the current zeitgeist.
Wow that is certainly a look.
There's plenty of art that's celebrated, but also kinda weird and ugly. Is "Vertumnus" by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1591) also a product of the "brand age"? What about various gargoyles and grotesques on old church buildings?
Some people just like weird art, maybe because they think it reflects their own quirky or rebellious nature. Some of these people have money. I don't see why we need some sort of a cynical theory of a "brand-obsessed culture" at the center of it. How many people in your social circle are obsessed with brands? We might have a brand or two we like, typically because we like the way the products look or work. That's about it.
I know some people who like expensive watches. They talk about the design a lot more than they talk about who made it.
It looks like an Aliexpress Timex.
https://www.iwc.com/gb-en/watches/pilot-watches/iw388106-pil...
https://www.omegawatches.com/en-gb/watch-omega-speedmaster-m...
Since I'm not into luxury watches, a common occurrence is:
Me to a stranger: "Wow, cool watch! Which one is it?"
Stranger: "Random cheap brand I found on Amazon."
If you've never heard of Omega, Rolex, etc, chances are you won't be able to distinguish a cheap watch from an expensive watch. It's just the brand.
(OK, OK, chances are the material is a lot better - scratchproof, etc - but probably still costs less than 10% to make than what they sell for).
Here's the thing: Ever since I was a kid, the following features were basic:
1. Tells time
2. Tells date
3. Stopwatch
4. Alarm
5. Chrono (yes, I used that a lot for years).
All this for $50 or less.
I'm assuming the >$100 watches have all this? If not, IMO, the watch is simply failing at the very basics. It shouldn't even be called a watch.
Then Tier 2:
- Timer
- Multiple alarms
- World time
I pay extra for these (and use all of them).
The next tier (Tier 3):
- No batteries and/or solar. Definitely no manual winding.
The next tier:
- Stuff like GPS, sunrise/sunset, etc.
Personally, only after Tier 3 would I consider paying extra for all the things you mentioned. But paying $300+ for a watch without a timer or world time? You've been scammed.
How much have you paid for a pen? Montblanc ball point pens can exceed $1000. Apply everything you said to a (ballpoint) pen - one that most likely will write poorer than a good $50 fountain pen - and you'll see how people view what you are saying.
Yeah, when you spend half a million dollars on a watch, the sunk-cost fallacy has gotta hit hard.
TFA says this:
> If mechanical watches had only been accurate to a minute a day they couldn't have made the leap from keeping time to displaying wealth.
I don't think it's necessarily about displaying wealth: we could discuss humans (not just women but also men) wearing some kind of jewelry since thousands of years, including poor people who don't do it to display wealth but just because they enjoy the look of it. There was an article about monkeys enjoying the looks of crystals the other day I think.
One example would be people who don't dress nicely and who drive a cheap car and overal look like they just don't care about what others do think, and yet wear a dive watch. There are countless dive watches, be it a cheap no-name one, a perfect chinese replica of a Rolex Submariner (some replicas have most parts that can be exchanged with real Rolexes, which created the entire "frankenwatch" thing: where some parts are from the true brand and others have been swapped by chinese parts) or a real Rolex Submariner or Sea-Dweller costing $10 K to $20 K (for the base models).
Also in an age of alienating technology, something has to be said about a 100% mechanical device that's not connected to anything and doesn't require a battery to work, however imprecisely: it's not just about the beauty of the object when you look at it. It's also the beauty in having something that's not spying on you.
Just like there are people who, for a variety of reason, only ever take out their old Ferrari for a spin at night (when there's no trafic).
I take it you could very probably say: "Most people own fancy mechanical watches and high-end sport cars to flaunt wealth". But you can't generalize to 100% of watch owners and Ferrari owners.
Once one of my favourite writers is really hard to read now.
It feels to me like he is so overconfident now that he thinks he gets it in any topic, even on the ones he has very little understanding of.
This particular article, I would say compherensive, but lacking substance.
The very promise of this article, that people primarily paying for brand name is simply wrong and it does not take too much time to spend in watch circles to know this.
What people pay is not performance/features/value, obviously. But the prime factor is also not the brand name. With the exception of Rolex, practically nobody knows if your watch costed $100 or $100,000.
What people pay for is artistry, reliability, and level-of-polish. These all have a cost that justify the price of the watch. Nobody pays $10,000 for a watch that could be produced for $100 just because of its brand name.
Just today I went to a watch repair person because the keeper on my strap broke. He said the only option is to buy the exact strap from the manufacturer.
The strap costs $120.
My watch costs $340 (although I got it on a discount for $220).
This is the most expensive watch I've ever bought. I typically would pay $50 or less (with the exception of one G-Shock that cost $80). I finally decide to buy something "pricey" and the darn thing breaks in less than 2 years - something that never happens with the cheap watches I've bought.
No thanks. I'm not paying $120 for a new strap. I'm getting a cheap watch that will last me over a decade (as most of my watches do).
I had the same experience with fountain pens. Every fountain pen I've paid more than $50 for has been worse than my favorite cheap ones.
If I were to plot quality on the y-axis, and price on the x-axis, I think I'll find a U or V curve, where on the very cheap end things are reliable and last long, and likewise on the very expensive end. But in the middle, you're just paying extra for crap.
Arguably, you could say I'm not paying enough. A $330 watch isn't expensive. I should have paid $3000. A $90 pen isn't expensive. I should have paid $250.
No thanks. When the <$50 products perform as well as the expensive ones, I'm not paying more.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/comments/187srga/what_watch...
Clunky AF. The guy wearing this watch edited the OP's article, amongst other things. To any reasonable person the vast majority of these watches look like absolute dogshit. You know what looks good? The watches that these brands make for women!
PG described exactly the intention that goes into the design of these watches, in this very article. It's not what you say it is!
I dunno there. I think that Paul Graham does not know much about what he talks about ... but these watches are not beautiful. I give you that there was care and intention put into them, but they are just ugly as a result.
And I did went through period of trying to find cool good looking old school watch. For some reason, the current watch style is ranging between "meh" and "ugly".
Not that Apple's only appeal is marketing, Mac laptops certainly have pros over the bottom and mid tier Windows laptops. But having seen that video, and knowing that other have seen it, are aware of Apple and its positioning, makes people feel better while using and owning their devices.
People absolutely want that feeling and they're willing to pay for it.
Macbook Neo customers want Apple to put out creative product marketing videos, they believe it is part of the offer.
I haven't given a shit about Apple marketing since I was a teenager, and I have bought many Apple products since then. If they could turn their marketing spend into a discount on the price instead I'd happily pay less. (Of course, this would reduce their sales, so it wouldn't work that way, but I'm not in it for the videos I've never watched.)
Obviously I'm aware they still have their fanatics, but how much of their sales is that really?
Also, watches are status symbols to a really narrow niche. Vast majority of people cannot name a non-Rolex expensive watch and would assume Seiko (and maybe Tissot) are the best watches after Rolex, followed by Swatch (and maybe Timex).
I'd do that in a heartbeat for a MacBook, though. Same as with any other consumer good.
Apple is competing in the "premium fit and finish" product space, not the "luxury good" space, so the brand is significantly less of a factor of the value for their devices than it is for Rolex, IWC, etc.
And despite the essay linked here—which seems like a lot of words spilled on a fairly mundane history lesson—I don't think "luxury goods are driven by name value" is anything new. Goes back to the wealthy being patrons of the arts for hundreds, thousands of years... They wanted their name associated with those works, and they wanted those works to be famous. Status all the way down. "When telling the time became ubiquitous, the luxury goods part of the watch market became an increasingly large part of it" is uninteresting.
There are of course people who buy Rolexes or whatever for the brand. There are probably more people who buy Mac Books for the logo.
But most people are rational. Most people would pay that much money for a watch only if it does not impact their finances in a meaningful way, but within that, they would want to buy the highest quality they can. And for some people that means an IWC, Omega, Longines, or whatever. If they could buy the same quality from a less known brand, they would. Lots of people buy Grand Seikos at Rolex prices. I buy normal Seikos at $300. We all pay for the quality we can afford.
Brand is important because it is an insurance that you are not being scammed. Besides that, it is not the main factor let alone “era defining” as the article is trying to make it out.
The MacBook Neo is the opposite of pg's "Brand Age". It's very subtly branded, the Apple is no longer shiny and "MacBook" isn't written anywhere in it. There are no identifiably-Apple design quirks, no notch. It's just the platonic ideal of a laptop. Screen, keyboard, trackpad. Nothing extra.
The cutesy intro video will be the main driver of ~0 sales for it.
Except for the gigantic Apple logo plastered all over the lid?
Don't get me wrong, I like Apple design (and I adore early Braun), but subtly branded it is not. You're supposed to recognize it instantly at any distance. Apple knows their brand value.
There's no beautiful people, no successful lifestyle or even a face in the launch video.
There was a big argument about iPad w/Pencil vs laptop, but they all said it was a good laptop for highschool/uni.
None of them have seen or used one.
Sounds a hell of a lot like the diamond industry. Also, the top fashion houses, but both industries are taking a drubbing from artificial competition (artificial diamonds, and knockoffs, of various stripes).
I'm a believer in branding. I worked for many years, for a company with a "top-shelf" brand, and saw what it took, to maintain. But it takes a huge amount of discipline and "silly" stuff. Brand damage can come from a million different directions. I have found very few people are willing to do what it takes to maintain a top brand.
For quite a while, there have been "brand-only" products, like Von Dutch, or Life Is Good™. They are the two-dollar hat, with the twenty-dollar logo. Like Izod Lacoste or Members Only, in the last century.
Sometimes, you can't fight it, but other times, trying to correct can only make things worse.
This is where having sober, experienced PR people and CEOs comes into play. There's no "textbook" way to deal with this stuff. It is different, each time, so you need smart leaders (something in short supply, these days).
The company that I worked for, was a camera company. One of their brand-protection strategies, was to have as much control as possible over any images made public from their cameras.
They went waaaaaay out of their way to help photographers get the best results, and it was a bitch to get test images from prerelease kit.
[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/corona-urine-rumor-cou...
There are brands for non-rich: Linux is a very strong brand but virtually free and non-exclusive at all (think Android phones). Patriotism and country reputation might also be thought as brands. E.g. would Portugal's tourist boom happen without the Portuguese tarts popularity?
Edit: my watch is a Pebble.
Pebble went out of business, incidentally.
Comparing with luxury watches which cost a magnitude or two more and are beaten in precision by a $10 casio.
I guess the thing to watch out for is technical stagnation and "good enough"? Uh..
* https://bookshop.org/p/books/no-logo-no-space-no-choice-no-j...
I.e. in the early days (2023-2025, lol), companies were mostly differentiated by the quality of their LLM, i.e. GPT-3.5 was leagues ahead of anyone else, so was for serious work the only game in town. Until recently it was basically only the US based companies (OpenAI/Anthropic) with models worth using.
Now, Anthropic and OpenAI are neck-and-neck, and Chinese models are catching up fast, and the models are becoming commodities, and as long as they reach some threshold of quality/capability, it doesn't really matter to most customers.
So now we might be reaching the branding stage of LLMs. I.e. do you go for Anthropic, who are branding themselves as the responsible ones, or OpenAI, who are branding themselves as... the innovators? Not sure what they are going for these days.
If all models are roughly equally capable, all that's left is branding.
At least those are the thoughts it provoked in me. If that's what Paul Graham meant or not I have no idea.
I think the comparison is warranted, and human-crafted code will perhaps become a brand differentiator in the future too.
If the business really mainly on the technical merits of the product/service, even blank brand is an option. Many brand as a façade to a single plant is a different tradeoff.
The utility stems not from the functionality of watch itself but from what it signals to other people.
It’s a simple status games. PG, like every other human being, also plays status game. But not with watches.
He plays with a different group of people. With different rules for status gain/loss.
Maybe it's: who has the better blog, or the better investments. I don’t know because I don’t live in his world.
A political admin lies directly to your face daily - well, the base doesn't care because they've bought into the brand. The Truth and principles are irrelevant.
A talented musician is making innovative, fresh music - but hasn't yet learned the ability to market herself on IG/TikTok - well, she won't reach an audience because she can't compete in a brand game dominated by marketers and AI-driven beat-makers. The music is irrelevant.
Creating software used to be a very human thing - empathetic understanding of the user's problems, a dash of inspiration and good taste, and you get some cool stuff and possibly a valuable company; but now, if all that's automated, what is it? The craft is irrelevant.
Hmmmm. Perhaps his essay wasn't dark enough.
I just want to add a minor point that the marketing/advertising industry in general just sometimes feels very unethical to me and I am worried about that too.
Increasingly so, The only way to survive in brand age is to connect to two or three centralized platforms. Authenticity feels redundant.
> A talented musician is making innovative, fresh music - but hasn't yet learned the ability to market herself on IG/TikTok - well, she won't reach an audience because she can't compete in a brand game dominated by marketers and AI-driven beat-makers. The music is irrelevant.
Although I could've ended my comment previously, I do think that there are just very few cracks and ripples within the algorithm. At some point we have to step up to preserve authenticity. It isn't as if those people aren't trying but that you can't find them.
I found this person who makes music[0] on my youtube shorts on how his genz cousin told him to make videos of his everday life with his music in background (He sells pizzas and left college to make music) and there is a small community of viewers/music listeners who have joined him now. It made me genuinely think and stop from the doom scroll, Although small but it was one sure of an experience.
I do think that if there is a race to the bottom for code/infra/even marketing. At some point, the idea becomes of fulfilling/creating an experience but I do think that the passion of the people who create things isn't gone to waste because the passion that they applied into creating any form of software now, can be reflected back to the user in form of experience.
Atleast that's my take. Another product I found interesting like this was fluxer.gg[1](discord alternative)
Maybe there can be a platform/mass adoption of the thing where one can just share cool people doing cool things and have links of them which can say "hey check them out! What they are doing is cool"
(I actually tried out some bookmark app just right now but funny thing happened haha where it accidentally destroyed my whole collection as I tried to have a collection name be All, and they don't have support so that I can't even guide them to fix it :/ so its better if we use open source solutions in this maybe, Luckily I was only trying it out but this actually makes me feel like this sharing should be made easier and less error prone
it would be hard to see if average people realize this and if they do end up doing it at decent scale where it makes meaningful difference tho.)
Edit: I rediscovered Linkhut, it feels really good as well. I will be having some fun with it especially with the social elements of it, its front page is about what the official logo of html should be :D (https://ln.ht)
[0]Fuji Gateway - Tuesdays, Am I Right? (Official Lyric Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijjb_0RW28c
[1]Fluxer: https://fluxer.gg
Why is IG so much better than Spotify itself's algo? Or YouTube's? Or... etc? No idea. And also - it's always paid ads from these artists that get me.
So on the one hand, <insert my original point>; but on the other, as much as technology is perhaps driving the brand hollowness, it's also allow for more long-tail discovery precisely because it makes powerful marketing/advertising channels accessible to that girl making beats in her bedroom - so long as she has a bit of $ to deploy. It still may not be profitable for her (because: Spotify) but I also try to support these artists with merch buys, physical buys, etc.
not sure what tfa is trying to say here, but this is far from being an indictment of the current age. the term "golden age" is (from what I've seen) usually used for the time when an industry or field was taking the leap from niche to mainstream, and in the process defining some of the things that would later come to be considered characteristic. by that token, of course the golden age of watchmaking is not today - the field has already gone mainstream and indeed does retain a lot of the characteristic features that the golden age innovated upon and defined.
That said, in the case of watches (no pun intended), Grand Seiko seems like a counterexample to a few of the points made. First, they are very much still sold on the basis of both brand/design and engineering. Spring drive is an engineering marvel, and a lot of people appreciate such works of human ingenuity even if they are not technically the optimal approach to solving the underlying problem. (Though it is nice never having to change batteries.) Even their notably high frequency mechanical movements are desirable on that basis.
More importantly, GS watches have very distinctive design elements that are easily recognized (ie. branding), and I would argue they sacrifice nothing in terms of usability to achieve that. Their dials in particular are works of art, but they make the watch no more difficult to read, just more enjoyable.
While the Swiss are competing for exclusivity, GS's UFA is clearly generations ahead of anything else in the market.
That said, as a GS owner, I still think their marketing sucks, the watch photos on their website are garbage, and no one except us watch nerds are going to remember SBGA211.
So they’re the same thing but from two frames of reference?
I’m not sure this metaphor holds.
Is this really true? Mechanical watches. Sailing yachts. Fountain pens. Analog audio...
So, when we talk about the real and imagined value of a watch, we can consider it from different angles. You cannot pick one (like the first) and reduce all value judgements to just that measure.
1. the utility of a watch as a timekeeping artifact
2. the aesthetic quality as a work of art
3. the quality as ornament/jewelry
4. the effectiveness as signal of wealth
5. the quality as a particular kind of technology (mechanical vs. quartz), perhaps as an expression of historical techniques
The aim and measure are critical.
The trouble, then, is not that Patek is bad. A nice Patek watch is of excellent quality as (2), (3), and (5). As (1), for everyday use, yes; along an absolute axis concerned only with accuracy and precision, not so much. (4) is where the pathological and deceptive begins to creep. Where the market price with respect to (1), (2), (3), and (5) would reflect a just price, (4) becomes a race to the bottom of the most vulgar and base and irrational sort.
For many men, the wristwatch is the only socially acceptable jewelry they can wear. Jewelry is usually used to signify some combination of status and taste, so it makes a lot of sense to spend more on watches with nerdy features like automatic windup, spring drive, etc. Women have other ways of displaying status and taste.
"The more subtle lesson is that fields have natural rhythms that are beyond the power of individuals to resist. Fields have golden ages and not so golden ages, and you're much more likely to do good work in a field that's on the way up."
Cigarettes were resisted, leaded fuel was resisted, nuclear energy was resisted. AI is already being resisted and the resistance will grow.
Commoditized software is here. Will there be a market for high-end, luxury software? Becoming an artificially scarce veblen good is unlikely to work for digital goods the way it has for watches.
Is he talking about software development here? Are we going to call the pre-LLM era the golden age where relatively limited set of individuals had to be paid a lot to craft artisanal "code" which with LLMs became super cheap?
however things come in cycles, so who knows maybe the next will come by
And the people who were able to click Save as HTML in Word creating a complete jumble that only worked in IE
FTFY!
Respectfully disagree.
Since the 60's (and one could argue, even long before that), watches are 1) fashion, and 2) male wealth-signaling fashion. That's it. Nothing more. And for males who subscribe to this wealth-signaling cult, they know from a long way away what watch brand is on that guy's wrist.
Okay, today's brands signal maybe a little differently than just wealth. Casio G-Shock watches aren't substantially different than their non-G-Shock counterparts in any significant way, but they cost way more. The G-Shock brand signals... I dunno, sportsy-ness? Maybe it is closer to a pure fashion brand here.
I think we've been in "The Brand Age" since the advent of advertising. There are plenty of products that have virtually no differentiation besides brand, and there (almost) always has been.
No, they didn’t. The makers of movements and makers of cases were separate. From far away you only know the case on the wrist. Not the movement. (I think Rolex was the first mass-market Swiss watch brand to vertically integrate. Patek may have been the first boutique.)
The movement was the expensive part. Audemars, Vacheron and Patek only made movements. The retailer would then put it in a case. That’s the entire point of PG’s essay.
> if you couldn't tell them apart, they wouldn't be any good at signaling, the entire point of wearing them
Which might lead you to revise your hypothesis around why these watches were bought and made in the “golden age of watches.” Then as now there is such a thing as quiet luxury.
I don't think thats really true, Audemars & Patek deffo made entire watches in the 50s.
Don't get me wrong they also designed movements, but by the time of the quartz crisis, Patek bought in movements from outside.
It doesn't really help that omega and tissolt were merged with Certina, ETA, hamilton when then turned into swatch, which basically dominates the entire swiss watch industry along with rolex and richemont(who own Vacheron)
The watch manufacturer, as part of their reputation, buys “premium” internal components. And then the hardcore watch-heads get to know that this model has that premium movement. Everybody in the club gets to signal to each other by knowing internal details that outsiders don’t notice (or even details that can’t be noticed, I mean, I assume by nowadays non-premium-brand movements are functionally identical to the premium ones).
G-Shock says “I do things that are so dangerous and so off the grid your Rolex or Apple Ultra would shatter and die”. And it’s true, out of my whole collection, that’s the one that will still be within a ms of true time 25 years after the power goes out after the nukes go off.
I own (among other, nicer time pieces) a G-Shock. I bought it when I was in the military and frankly it's a great watch that has withstood some serious abuse. Maybe a cheaper watch would have also survived? I'd happily buy another but mine's still literally and figuratively ticking.
Case in point:
- company was testing out their mail based fundraising drive
- they randomly tested cheap vs expensive envelopes, regular envelopers vs side opening envelopes etc for how people could send back a check
- they found that expensive envelopes beat cheap and side envelopes beat top loading
The part that was fascinating is that many folks would think "what difference does it make what kind of envelope you use?". Sutherland points out that putting a check for a large amount in a cheap envelope somehow feels "wrong" even if people can't verbalize this.
Another example is how in the 1950s many food engineers were obsessed with the idea of "food nutrient pills" and how they would replace cooking and eating out in restaurants. While it's true that things like Soylent and Huel made inroads with the tech crowd, most people still love going out to restaurants. The point being b/c eating out isn't only about eating: it's also about taking your wife out for your anniversary or meeting your siblings who are visiting from abroad.
I mention this b/c the HN crowd tends to be very logical/rational (including myself) and this book was a real eye opener around how people actually make decisions.
1. Cereal
Apparently cereal makers were losing money b/c they priced their product at a much lower price point than, at the time, the regular breakfast of bacon and eggs.
They hired a consultant who pointed out they could raise their prices as long as it was lower than bacon and eggs, make more money and still be cheaper.
2. Raising prices
There is a story in one of the pricing/economics books about a store keeper who told her assistant to halve the price of jewelry that wasn't selling. The assistant misheard and doubled the price. The jewelry immediately sold.
3. The shelf that always sells
In the book about Shopsin's in NYC, the author and owner mentions that certain shelves in a store will sell out of whatever is on that shelf. Regardless of price, product, time of year etc.
Apparently, putting things right by the front door in supermarkets is the opposite: very few people buy anything that is there. I noticed that one of the Real Housewives of NJ had her food product there and thought to myself: someone is giving you bad advice and/or humoring you by putting your product there.
https://www.econtalk.org/seiko-swatch-and-the-swiss-watch-in...
What things are not quite there but will have their Brand Age next? AI? Spaceships?
I'm also a bit confused as to whether there's judgment in the article though. He's applauding branding as a survival technique, but also saying it's silly and vestigial. So if we find ourselves in a Brand Age because we've succeeded in solving the last really hard problem we should... drop everything and find another problem so we can move it into the Brand Age?
Either way - thoughts were provoked so thx for that.
Of course, there are downsides. Nobody's gonna just walk away with your watch, but a cable on your desk that also costs $1000? And also, a lot of us would look at your diamond-encrusted USB adapter and think "this man is a moron."
For $99.95, you can own an exquisite 0.75m USB-C 2.0 "High-Definition Audio Cable" [1], featuring "high-purity 0.5% Silver conductors and a Metal-Layer Noise-Dissipation for the most efficient dissipation of radio-frequency noise."
It has "Direction-Controlled Conductors: All drawn metal strands or conductors have a non-symmetrical, and therefore directional, grain structure. AudioQuest controls the resulting RF impedance variation so that noise is drained away from where it will cause distortion. The correct direction is determined by listening to every batch of metal conductors used in every AudioQuest audio cable. When applicable, arrows are clearly marked on the connectors to ensure superior sound quality." Power Delivery: No. Country of origin: China.
My web search didn't reveal any $1000 USB cables - doubtless those are offered only privately to the most discerning connoisseurs.
[1] https://www.audioquest.com/products/forest-usb-c-c-digital-a...
Funny thing is, I'm not sure anyone is actually doing either thing successfully. Every time I've looked into an openclaw success story it's ended up being complete fiction.
Hobbes: …
Calvin: A good shirt turns the wearer into a walking corporate billboard!
Hobbes: …
Calvin: It says to the world, “My identity is so wrapped up in what I buy that I paid the company to advertise its products!”
Hobbes: You’d admit that?
Calvin: Oh, sure. Endorsing products is the American way to express individuality.
> Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal.
Functional design is centripetal. "Good" design is one which achieves the designer's goals, which are often much more complicated than that.
The money presumably goes to some good cause ( her thing at the moment is some rare pediatric neurological disorder ) and the organisers get to socialise with each other and wear millions in clothing and jewels.
My only question about this entire essay is... where did this time traveler came from???
"Our" time traveler was never mentioned until this line.
> The best way to answer that might be to imagine what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine. [...] The first thing he'd notice, if he walked through a fancy shopping district, is that all the prominent watchmakers of the golden age seem to be doing better than ever.
Looks like PG drew inspiration from there. Or just a coincidence
Namely, the whole story of the rebound is Nicolas Hayek and Swatch. You see, at the explosion of quartz watches, everyone already had a drawer full of Rolexes and Pateks and AP's. They had done that. But telling time? More accurately? That was actually pretty boring.
Nicolas Hayek became a hero. It's fair to say, yes, he consolidated ASUAG + SSIH and built volume and all that. But really? It was about Emotion and redefining the Essential Function of a watch.
Swatch made Swiss watches cool again. The marketplace was saying Japan vs. Switzerland and quartz vs. old fashioned gears. Swatch rejected that and said "fun, whimsical. Wear not one, but several. You be you." What landed the message was wealthy Swiss keeping the Rolex in the drawer and believing in the the $19 Swatch. Aston Martin and Swatch. That was the way to roll.
It became a thing, the kids bought in, and the Swiss Watch Industry (Big Watch, lol) stayed relevant vs. Japan. It was a country vs. country fight and Swiss prevailed on creativity.
Swatch was such a watershed moment, tha that across Europe the key to Industrial Success became "Personalized Mass Production." Why? Because swatch quickly grew to be able to launch 2x70 models a year. The German Industrialists included personalized mass production and innovation in every slide deck for the next 20 years. And if you don't think that matters, look at Zara, and then Shein. Same playbook as Swatch. Swatch changed everything.
I am not saying it is, but it sounds like the first paragraph of every Gemini deep research.
Wow, that is… not what I would recommend. Brand is one of the few things that will give you pricing power in the age of AI.
Software. everyone can do it now. but you still buy lets say Crowdstrike for security, because is in your brain for years as security software.
BYD is more reliable and arguably better by metrics that matter to people.
BMW still has more cachet and is bought largely for the brand value.
If you have to explain why your product is expensive, maybe it shouldn’t be.
The last paragraph goes so far as to predict/hope that the whole sector will at some point simply die:
> mechanical watches would start to be seen by the next cohort of young rich people as an old guy thing. It's hard to imagine a luxury watch brand surviving that.
In cauda venenum if there ever was one.
There was a time when software was closer to a freer market and there was room for anyone to be the next google. But this moment is deeply political, tactical, and the existing incumbents have so much power that learning the intricacies of their systems may be make or break for any of your goals (e.g. how to advertise on google, or get featured on the app store, how to secure a government contract, etc). It isn't a time for abstract generalities (like chasing "golden ages")
At least I don't think anybody is or should be asking how to build "great" stuff anymore, great hasn't won in many categories. Most things that were great were so only to gain a moat and then enshittify.
I'd be really curious if he's happy where the tech-world is now, if he sees it as an oligopoly, if he sees it as meritocratic, and if he sees any hope of it getting better.
It's like watching a hyper-rational alien species trying to understand humans.
> "Wait...So you purchased this at 5X the price of another product because of how it makes you feel about yourself, and not for its utility? Fascinating!"
We've been in the brand age for 200 years. This is nothing new. Technology products have just been so uniquely useful due to fast innovation that silicon valley has largely been able to ignore the centuries old techniques of Madison Avenue.
Every single market as it matures ultimately turns into a marketing competition, not a product competition. It has always been this way. Silicon Valley is the new Detroit.
He does not disappoint. Also, not buying the watch industry parable.
Remember winamp skins?
"The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." - Shklovsky on defamiliarization
What pg is really writing about is enshittification, consumerism.
This is an amazing quote, and I'm immediately adding it to my repertoire. Thank you!
1. TV (TikTok)
2. Cars (and parking)
3. Buying shit is fun
I don't own a TV or use TikTok, and I don't use a car, and I don't shop. My experience with brands is very limited but also not that unusual. It's very San Francisco, a town whose nice parts (and problems) are very much, the future of your community, not its past.
In contrast, there's Reno. It has 10 lane roads criss crossing a business district that is as big as the whole of San Francisco, and it's all brand stores with ample parking. There's no like, La Taqueria. There's Qdoba and Chipotle and Target. Are you getting it? You drive everywhere and you watch TikTok while you drive, and Costco and other brands pay TikTok to tip the scales to make videos mentioning them go viral (that's their ads business, to people who don't know how it really works or get hopelessly fixated on requiring a citation for every fact they learn online), and it's a brand culture. It's videos of cute girls - they weren't paid to do this! - but they're in Costco buying shit, and there are a lot of cute girls on TikTok, but curiously it's the videos of theirs interacting with brands that go viral. And most of all, parking. There's so much parking to buy your brand shit. Driving around in your really cozy car, spending your whole day never elevating your heart rate.
And it works! Your life is really great with brands and cars and TV, because likes and wirecutter recommendations are a very secular, very nonjudgmental form of truth, it looks like objectivity and requires little brain power to digest.
So brands and cars and TikTok all synergize together like a cheeseburger's interior. It doesn't really have much at all to do with trade or innovation nowadays.
However swatch group(omega was force merged in the 80s to form the swatch group) has 3x the turnover of Patek.
More over Swatch caters to both high end and the poors + kids. So brand is.. good? so long as you only cater for the rich? I'm not getting that really.
What people usually mean when they talk about differentiation is distinctiveness [1]. Design isn't a differentiator for these watches it's about being distinctive. At the end of the day when telling the time is commoditized, and expensive watches are just a status symbol it's all you've got.
[1] - https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/differentiat...
Most software especially SaaS like Salesforce or Shopify is B2B infrastructure. Brand loyalty there is way thinner and more fragile. Businesses don't pick tools to feel cool or exclusive. They pick what actually runs the operation better keeps their data safe and doesn't screw them long-term. Unlike a finished watch you own outright, software is a live service. You never know if tomorrow they'll yank a feature you rely on, hide it behind a new paywall, churn the UI, or jack up prices to please shareholders. Enshittification is brutal in this space because companies have to keep growing revenue forever. Open-source or self-hosted options keep winning ground for exactly that reason. True ownership and predictability beat any brand when it's your P&L on the line.
I have written that comment on here now[0]
The TLDR tho of my post/comment is that Brand age that PG mentions is essentially something so linked to marketing and advertising and spending money/injecting money and becoming the differentiating factor. This can be a big thing for pure capitalists but the current forms of advertising rely on black boxes attention centralized which you have to go to ads for and this whole system feels rent seeking for the existence of livelihood/businesses extracting money from them small or large and very famously, Adam smith was against forms of rent-seeking.
Marketing to me seems like converting everything to a statistic and everything related to marketing subsequently starts having infinitely looser morals which I don't think I need to be telling everybody of. It feels like trying to capitalize on top of anything or everything without any regards to anything.
I do think that we do have some say in it. The nature of AI is that its out and there is no way of putting it back in the box especially with OSS models reaching parity and no company is putting their frontier models back and this means that AI slop is something that we just have to deal with. But instead of dealing it with brands which can inject money because they got money. It's better if we try to filter things on top of authenticity and I do feel like we have a say in this.
have a nice day.
[0]:https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/i-dont-want-brand-age-...
It's also a sales tactic - a watch can be a schelling point if you're looking to network with someone who's into it.
2000s brought Hiphop bling culture to them which embraced maximalism with size further increasing and 85 diamonds and rubies being something worthy of showing.
2010s austerity led to a retreat all the way to 1940s style trench and dress watches, cases back to 38mm.
Post Covid, boldness is having a comeback. See the newest Planet Ocean. We are seeing bling and ostentatious gold again on celebrities this year.
I asked Claude to psychoanalyze why I got obsessed with them and it said I’m likely striving for something tangible that appeals to my engineer mindset that isn’t now obsolete in the age of AI. It’s my career’s existentialism.
(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economi...
EDIT: Nevermind comments are apparently just a pg meta discussion..
Because looking at Truth Social and Gab, people do adopt brands as part of their identity; and Uber but for drivers, or Facebook, without the spying, are trivial to make the software side of things on now. The fact that we haven't seen a dozen Uber competitors spring up is a testament to the fact that branding is a helluva moat. It's impossible to put a dollar value on it, but ChatGPT has no moat, except that it's Chat-fucking-GPT. The original chatbot and no matter how good Claude gets, it'll never be the original.
The New Coke brand failed because people didn't like the taste, not the other way around.
I drink Diet Coke, which is basically the same formula that became New Coke with chemical sludge instead of sugar, and it tastes pretty good to my tongue to the point where I drink it over Coke Zero, the one closer to "the real thing".
Some of them will. And I suspect the set of markets in which they do will only increase—traditional SWE is probably dying, hard as that is to accept. But the fundamentals of engineering and business are nowhere close to going away. And those are the actually-hard parts of business.
Results are still, on average, very faulty.
No, you couldn’t. At best you’d turn out a video game simulating Uber. The idea that all of the business is in its software seems to be one Silicon Valley perennially unlearns.
I've noticed a significant tone and demographic shift on the site over the past 2-3 years with more Western Europeans and Midwesterners and fewer Bay Area+NYC users, and fewer decisionmakers or decisionmaking adjacent people using the site.
And the deeply technical types who used HN largely shifted to lobste.rs.
Karrot_Kream (another longtime HN user) identified this shift as well [0]
The reality is, most people are in-person now and conversations that were happening on HN because of the pandemic are now being done offline.
Blind is toxic, but at least the users are cynically realistic.
There's also a tension between the increasing "community building" happening on HN and the Bay Area/NYC crowd. A lot of them have an extant community largely based on in-person relationships. The more HN builds its own community, the more you alienate this set of people. In other words, Slashdotification is happening more and more to HN where a set of very online tech people who don't really make decisions generate most of the chatter on this site.
Social media is different because of the network effects. Taking hold requires being there to catch refugees when something else collapses, and being sensitive to the fact of that collapse. It seems like quite a bit of luck is often required.
But you could also, you know, actually try to differentiate yourself. Figure out actual things that you'd want those sites to do differently, and have an opinion on which different approach to take.
And I especially wouldn't try with Twitter, because there are already at least two major competitors, and the people who have fled to them, in broad terms, seem to have done so based more on internal social strife than on any technical dissatisfaction. (Despite all the seemingly obvious technical issues to complain about!)
The very same people who would be flagging that comment wouldn't bat an eye at saying they won't read or support anything by folks like DHH, or a hundred other prominent tech figures who have committed some ideological-wrong.
It's just a similarly heavy-handed reaction from the other side of the divide.
I don't find anything wrong or downvotable about people voicing perfectly valid criticisms about pg, his opinions, who he associates with and signal-boosts...unless these standards you all want to apply wrt cancellation are "for thee and not for me".
You have no way of knowing that. The guidelines against off-topic controversy and generic tangents apply, no matter who the author.
First off, you might be right for some small number of cases, but I’d flag any and all rants such as this, regardless of the target. Off-topic, and doesn’t contribute to the conversation.
Second, for those as you describe, when they go off on an off-topic rant about DHH, someone else will conveniently flag it.
We acknowledge this message board is the rightful unceded home of the startup enthusiast people. We affirm their right to it and recognize their sovereignty.
See, you enjoy me bringing pet subject into discussion with nebulous relation? You want always to see it? Good. I will do so. No downvote it unfair.
what's they key thesis here and the argument ?
*Key thesis:* When technology eliminates meaningful performance differences between products, industries shift from competing on *engineering and function* to competing on *brand and status*. The Swiss watch industry after the quartz crisis is a clear example: mechanical watches stopped being valuable tools and became *luxury symbols whose value comes mainly from branding, scarcity, and signaling wealth*.
*In one sentence:* The essay argues that when technology makes functional differences between products disappear, industries shift from engineering competition to branding competition, and the modern luxury watch market illustrates how that transformation works.
---
If you want, I can also explain *why this essay is controversial among economists and designers*—there are a few big assumptions in the argument.
And the counter A few places the argument is debatable (even if it’s persuasive as a narrative):
It treats “brand” and “engineering” as mostly opposed. In practice, luxury buyers often do pay for engineering (finishing, durability, serviceability, movement architecture), and those technical choices can reinforce brand rather than fight it. The tension is real, but not always zero-sum.
It downplays other drivers of the Swiss recovery. The rebound isn’t only “they discovered brand.” Things like Swatch’s role in recapitalizing distribution/production, industry consolidation, improvements in manufacturing, and globalization of luxury demand can explain a lot of the late-1980s revenue surge alongside marketing.
The “artificial scarcity = managed asset bubble” framing is provocative but contestable. Scarcity can be interpreted as: capacity constraints, quality control, long-term brand stewardship, or channel strategy—not necessarily “bubble management.” It may function bubble-like in resale markets, but that doesn’t prove intent or fragility in the way financial bubbles work.
Some claims are asserted more than demonstrated. Examples: Rolex “abandoned research” after ~1960; “only three survived as independents”; “most brands are owned by six holding companies”; “they rebuy hundreds per year.” These might be true in broad strokes, but the essay uses them as load-bearing supports without showing evidence in-text (beyond a couple notes).
The design-history claims are simplified. Watch size and shape trends aren’t only branding; they’re also driven by changing tastes, ergonomics, manufacturing norms, sport/tool styling, and shifting notions of masculinity. “Big = cheap historically” is directionally true in some eras, but not a universal law.
The gender section is especially shaky. “Women never really went for mechanical watches” and the steam-engine analogy read like overgeneralizations—there are strong counterexamples (and cultural variation) that complicate that story.
It is possible to view the fact that capitalist markets can turn a desire for art, individuality, and "something special" into a business as a bad thing. I'm not entirely convinced that's particularly interesting, though... it seems just a localized restatement of a generic "capitalism is bad" take.
- This change of what used be a functional object into a brand was done to appeal to one-upmanship (my watch is more expensive than yours) rather than the aesthetic urge which drives appreciation for art. He doesn't blame the watch brands, it may have been the only way they could survive after the triple shock. But..
- If you're an engineer and techie type and are drawn to the complexity and mechanistic elegance of mechanical watches, he's warning you that the problems being worked on in the brand age actually take you away from good functional design which attracted you there in the first place.