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's the difference between AR and VR?
The simplest way I've found to think about this is a spectrum from fully digital to fully real, with mixed reality sitting in between.
On one end you've got VR (Virtual Reality), which immerses users in a completely digital environment where everything they see and interact with is computer-generated. Think of a medieval banquet hall that exists entirely in software: digital world, digital objects.
On the other end you've got AR (Augmented Reality), which overlays digital information and actions onto the real world. So you point your phone at a cathedral and get map panels, ratings, and location info layered on top of the actual camera view. Real world and real objects, with digital information and actions added on top.
And in the middle sits MR (Mixed Reality), which combines the real world with digital objects. Picture holding a tablet outdoors and seeing a digital building model dropped onto a real grassy landscape. Real world, but with digital objects placed into it.
When I got hands-on with Apple Vision Pro back in early 2024, I saw this same split play out in one product: an infinite canvas of app windows placed anywhere in your surroundings (the more AR-ish mode) and an immersive mode that replaces your physical surroundings with a fully digital environment (the more VR-ish mode).
So the short version: VR takes you somewhere else, AR brings digital stuff to where you already are, and MR splits the difference. But I'll be honest, if you ask me, this is all still being worked out. The categories are neat on a diagram, but the interaction paradigms are still very much up for grabs.