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Comment by lbrito | Hacker News Reader

That's just a non sequitur. "companies are already paying thousands per seat" has zero correlation with something being a fad or not. There are much more reasonable rationales explaining why companies are acting the way they are than "because AI coding is not a fad"

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It's just silly to claim it has zero correlation.

Can you name a service that charged companies thousands/seat/month that turned out to be almost or completely useless? There's lots of random services sold to corporates that are not very useful (all the random benefits besides health care, life insurance, and other big-ticket items), but the per-seat charge of those is much smaller.

Google Jam Board (and other digital whiteboards) had high upfront capex and lowish opex. Probably close to the price for how often they were used before being killed off.

Same with the MS surface(?) tables (not tablets). I saw load of companies buy into the hype and then discard.

Every consultant ever, but to be fair that's not per seat.

Hey I'm a consultant. They pay me to be a regular developer but they cannot hire since they just fired thousands of people which they apparently did need, turns out.

There are so many. Can I start with Oracle databases?

Oracle DBs have powered enormous numbers of applications and economic value.

Not a service, but do you remember Scrum Masters? We had them as full time employees not so long ago. Pure fad.

I hope this is sarcasm, or "half" my job doesn't exist or something. Or you talking about full time non-dev scrum masters?

Yes

Hah. Great example actually. But far less common than AI afaict.

Oracle and some company wide Microsoft licenses.

These are clearly useful.

Companies love to waste money on that kind of service, before this website became everything about AI, every week someone would post how they saved a gazillion dollars by leaving vercel or AWS to self hosting as an example.

So you think AWS is a fad?

> Can you name a service that charged companies thousands/seat/month that turned out to be almost or completely useless?

The Concorde turned out to be fad (not "useless" - which was your reframing.) Touted as the future of travel, each seat cost about $20,000 of today's dollars, but it turned out even at those high prices people and companies were willing to pay per-passenger, supersonic trans-Atlantic air travel is not economically viable, and was discontinued.

All the NLP experts that companies bring in to make those seminars despite it has been debunked decades ago for example…

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