The path to success in a dysfunctional world

The only way forward is to minimize liabilities
2025/05/03
The Cursory Journal

It used to be the case that in order to succeed at making a product, you had to care about a number of factors, quality, marketing and features. Developers would often meet the bare minimum for quality in certain cases but would get thwarted by more company backed, market friendly products, which would often look better, run well and were a lot more usable. Now I have started observing a new phenomenon whereby, barring something meets a bare-bones criteria for usability, people have started considering a new factor: liabilities. For a product, or a piece of software, there are a few major factors that I consider liabilities:

1. Do you own it? Liability of ownership
2. Who makes it? Liabilities of developer
3. What tech does it use? Liabilities of developing and running
4. What platforms does it run on? Liabilities to vendor lock in

It seems as of late that, companies and products that by their very nature or intention minimized these liabilities, are winning. Part of the success is of course attributed to the products themselves being good, but a major part of it has been how the products themselves were protected from the same decisions that both now and will eventually bring down most companies. There are a few notable products in both the software and hardware space that have managed to do this well, namely Linux, Steam, Framework, Blender, Godot. Recently, Microsoft has chosen a bizarre direction for Windows employing AI, adding copilot and a big AI button on their laptop keyboards. This is without mentioning how they decided to ignore all tenants of usability, longevity and practically abandoned their definition of what a desktop operating system meant. A direct consequence of this has been how Linux is now the only viable, personal desktop solution. I also believe that most passionate people, have been burned hard enough to understand, a desktop operating system needs to have certain core values, most important of which is the fact that anyone who has a copy of it, owns it (paid or free), to use as they wish and that it doesn't have a billion dollar liability developing it. Anyone developing something is a liability, but in the case of Linux, it is several orders of magnitude lower than that of any other platform. It has also been a consequence of the ethos of Linux, how it's developed and governed that companies like Valve, identified the liability of their core platform windows, years before anyone seriously talked about Linux as a desktop platform. Since their decision to develop steam machines around 2010, they have over the years developed proton, the runtime that allows games to run Linux, making it a far more viable platform for their average consumer. More recently, their steamdeck has been a joyful declaration of the usability of Linux, and to extrapolate heavily, a major indictment of how much of a liability, Windows as a platform had become.

These past few years have been a wakeup call for people who use game engines. Unity made a funny little decision last year, to shift their monetization and profitability strategy. Proprietary tools that exist in an almost monopolistic environment, have always been questionable. These are core technologies that people rely on and they fail all the liability checks I mentioned. You don't own them, you don't even have control over which version of the software you use. The company developing them is questionable, and has demonstrated a lack of principles in the past. The technology itself, is heavily specific to this one product, requires years of learning to get right, so much so that the use of the software itself, is a necessary career skill. Finally, this software locks down to particular operating systems, so you also have no say in where you use this. It should be noted that Adobe is the face of this approach to product development, in fact, it has been championing this approach for years. They've also made intelligent decisions to ensure they surround the creative space well by buying a lot of creative software companies, which they then skin, gut and retrofit to join their software cult, mocking artists. This is perhaps why Blender has been the best thing to happen in the creative space. Blender, alongside Godot have been extremely important pieces of software that seem to be the only viable path forward for creatives and they achieve this by shedding a huge chunk of these "liabilities" that plague, cripple and ultimately destroy most products.

Special mention for framework as most laptops suck, they've also gotten more expensive, progressively unrepairable and now they're doing silly little things by branding themselves as AI LAPTOPS. In this space, framework is a breath of fresh air. It's not the best laptop out there, it's also not the cheapest, but I can replace the ram, battery, customize and extend the storage and replace the motherboard. ALL of this is possible because framework puts in an incredible amount of effort and makes an incredible amount of concessions to how they operate by recognizing the pre-existing approaches to laptop design for what they are, liabilities. Sure, in order to have incredibly fast ram, it needs to now be soldered on the board, making it unrepairable. Sure, their laptop feels flimsy, because in their decision to allow the modularity they have, these were necessary concessions, and I wouldn't doubt that they've lost sales because of these core principles, simply because, it's been harder and slower to design laptops to look good, operate well and be repairable. I'd wager, that when the entire industry is hellbent on going the opposite route, all because an exec in a black turtleneck said so, this is the inevitable outcome. Most other laptops, including the one I am currently writing this on, are ticking time bombs. They will fail, soon, and when they fail, they will fail hard. Good luck trying to repair a laptop that's essentially a 1 piece circuit board now.

The recipe to succeed is simple now, pretty soon, all these products, and development methodologies will start to crash and burn. You no longer need to worry about attracting customers. You can just do what you need to and make something people want. While the competition catches fire because of predatory decisions they consciously made, you'll be the only sane option left standing.