My (yes, poignant) point of view is that these ideas aren't new. Tools where you visually string together someone else's units of code? These have been around for decades. We used to call them RAD tools. Now they have web backends in the cloud. Nothing much else is new.
Why did they suddenly become popular?
My (again, yes, poignant) point of view is that everything has already been done and nobody does anything original anymore. Developers were building roughly the same things over and over for different clients. Of course, taking these features and making them modular makes sense for those types of applications.
Nobody wants to invest big in unoriginal assembly line software products, and this way, they can spend the money on marketing and market manipulation instead.
Let me give a real world example to illustrate what I'm talking about.
Consider a product like Netflix - what they do is incredibly difficult and expensive. Huge deals with producers and studios, big productions involving thousands of workers, massive bandwidth requirements, difficult technical challenges in terms of streaming and scaling.
Now take something like Tinder - users upload a few photos and some text, they show the photos to other users and provide a chat when you match. Basically users are doing all the work.
Now compare these products at $10/mo for Netflix and $20/mo for Tinder.
The difference is marketing. Probably $18 of $20/mo for Tinder you're actually paying for advertising and market instruments. Likely 80% of the development work they do is artificial restrictions, upsell prompts and marketing platform integrations.
In this sort of economy, it's no longer about building products - "you are the product", so it's really just about churning out more of the same, in new wrapping, and spending enough on marketing and manipulation. Conditions were never better for shallow, unoriginal, cheap, useless products.
Of course these tools are going to flourish in this kind of market.
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My (yes, poignant) point of view is that these ideas aren't new. Tools where you visually string together someone else's units of code? These have been around for decades. We used to call them RAD tools. Now they have web backends in the cloud. Nothing much else is new.
Why did they suddenly become popular?
My (again, yes, poignant) point of view is that everything has already been done and nobody does anything original anymore. Developers were building roughly the same things over and over for different clients. Of course, taking these features and making them modular makes sense for those types of applications.
Nobody wants to invest big in unoriginal assembly line software products, and this way, they can spend the money on marketing and market manipulation instead.
Let me give a real world example to illustrate what I'm talking about.
Consider a product like Netflix - what they do is incredibly difficult and expensive. Huge deals with producers and studios, big productions involving thousands of workers, massive bandwidth requirements, difficult technical challenges in terms of streaming and scaling.
Now take something like Tinder - users upload a few photos and some text, they show the photos to other users and provide a chat when you match. Basically users are doing all the work.
Now compare these products at $10/mo for Netflix and $20/mo for Tinder.
The difference is marketing. Probably $18 of $20/mo for Tinder you're actually paying for advertising and market instruments. Likely 80% of the development work they do is artificial restrictions, upsell prompts and marketing platform integrations.
In this sort of economy, it's no longer about building products - "you are the product", so it's really just about churning out more of the same, in new wrapping, and spending enough on marketing and manipulation. Conditions were never better for shallow, unoriginal, cheap, useless products.
Of course these tools are going to flourish in this kind of market.