alt Hacker NewsIt's fun to see that even an extremely large company can find unexpected product market fit [0]. Per this article, "The company reportedly did not possess an engineering team dedicated to business customers or staff focused on developer relations, and lacked an enterprise AI strategy." That sounds insane in retrospect, but I think there's just inherent uncertainty in what people actually need and will use things for.
[0]https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html: "In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup... The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work."
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Maybe a bit of hindsight bias / the outside view here, but I feel like they're completely asleep if they didn't anticipate strong demand for this specific use case.
> "The company reportedly did not possess an engineering team dedicated to business customers or staff focused on developer relations, and lacked an enterprise AI strategy"
This is clearly a mis-statement, they have a whole annual conference for developers. Maybe they mean specifically AI devs.
Was this the case in the past?
My vibes were that Apple wound down the “actual work” side of their operations (including machines like Xserve), because Ives couldn’t handle the unsexiness and unpredictability of business requirements in hardware.
He was self-indulgent and only wanted to work on things that “vibed” with him, rather than what the customers needed. It’s easy to be creative when you get to do what you want to do, it’s hard when you have hard constraints.
It's also fun to see how many people here believed this was all some clear deliberate strategy in the first place rather than an accident.
No ‘staff focused on developer relations’ is entirely unsurprising based on what I see from the outside.
You should listen to the podcast Acquired, specifically Nvidia and then Jensen Huang. They basically lucked into AI. Some researcher was using Nvidia gaming cards, and reached out to them about questions on CUDA. That email eventually turned them into a trillion dollar question.