Hello!
Today I'm thinking about a line from Elon Musk that people are buying Full Self-Driving with a car attached, not the other way around. People buying the outcome (it drives me places) instead of the tool (a car) is going to impact a lot more products, especially software. At a high level, this is how AI upends existing companies. Why does this matter so much for software? Because software teams spent decades making tools people use to get the outcomes they want. Photoshop is a good example. It has thirty-plus years of interface built around manipulating pixels, but when you want to edit a photo you're thinking "make her hair flow to the left," not "select these pixels and apply a transform." The tool sits between you and what you actually want. I've been chasing this idea for a while. Back in 2024, I wrote about how the continuous march of "more features, more UI" leaves people with more functions they don't know about and don't use, and how AI lets you control software with hundreds of features by just telling it what you want to do. Last month I pushed it further: start from the outcome ("here's the news you asked for") and let people engage with the tools later if they want to. Outcome first, tool second. The car example just makes it really concrete. Nobody wants a steering wheel, they want to get somewhere. As we've said for years, we don't call carpenters "hammer users." So if you're building software today, ask yourself: what's the "it drives me places" version of your product? Because if you don't ship that, someone else will, with your tool attached as an afterthought.
What did you say about mobile in 2008?
Back in 2008, mobile was still very much an emerging trend, but the signals were already there if you were paying attention. At Webstock 2008, I wrote up Nat Torkington's "Design for the Future" talk, where mobile showed up as one of the key trends: designing for mobile devices because people need access to content and services everywhere. The advice back then was to invest in mobile user interface design because it's hard to get right, and to recognize that while open platforms for mobile were emerging, mobile systems were still largely closed.
I was also thinking a lot about the tension between rich and reach at the time. If you built a bare bones, text-only application, your reach was very wide (you'd show up on just about any device). But the more rich interactivity you added, the fewer devices you could reach. What excited me in 2008 was that this was changing: with things like the iPhone, you could get a pretty rich web experience just about anywhere you are. My bet was that the things that make the web great would keep making it to lots of different places.
So in 2008 I wasn't yet banging the "mobile first" drum the way I would a couple years later (that came around 2009 to 2010). But the groundwork was already being laid: mobile was growing fast, it was hard to design for, and the gap between rich experiences and broad reach was starting to close. Invest early, because getting mobile right takes practice.