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We've been talking about taste for a year now as it relates to AI, so I'm going to counterpoint it: if competitors can reproduce your features, UX, and visual decisions within days, your taste is not really an advantage. How many apps implemented pull down to refresh once one person did it? How many people even remember (or care) whose taste spawned that UX pattern? [1]

AI is not inaugurating an age of taste. It is shortening the half-life of taste and commoditizing software. What happens when software features, UX, and visual fidelity aren't competitive advantages anymore? If you ask me, it looks like business did in the 90s. We'll probably see the return of department store software in the next few years.

1: for the record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh

11 comments

Also Microsoft couldn’t match Apple taste with effectively all resources in the world. And they really tried.

True taste is interesting because is more like a worldview, a modus operandi, a continuous process… those are harder to replicate.

That's because Microsoft understood taste as aesthetic - "we can put it in a pretty box", rather than ethic - fundamental to the process of making the product.

Most of their endless UI/UX fails are organisational in nature, no amount of design can create beauty from an org structure which generated stupid requirements.

And nobody there cared enough or had enough power to force the org into a shape compatible with Apple-level design outcomes.

Microsoft was superior in both in the windows 95-2000 era, and with Metro (on phone, on desktop it was half-assed). The problem was when they started to try matching Apple, instead of staying true to the core of their own aesthetics.

Both the Fisher-Price XP style which was bot zeitgeist, and an attempt to answer for the skeumorphic tragedy apple was pursuing, and the recent floats, spacings, central taskbar mimichking the dock, etc...

I'm not really convinced Metro was better than anything Apple at the time, even though it was refreshing and interesting. Was it actually easier to use? I didn't really find that nor see it with others.

I used Windows Phone, and it was great, minimal, intuitive, and prodcutive for most usecases I had (email, texting, calls, maps/navigation, banking, listening to music, light productivity, taxi). It did not fit the gimmicky ad ridden hellscape we live in now, I'm not sure how it got so far in Microsoft. Possibly from some old memories of living of selling products instead of creating addictions and selling data of the addicts.

Version 7 and 8 were great UX-wise, I have mixed memories about 10, mostly performance regressions bugged me, but was still faster than most non-flagship androids of the time... yet sometimes it felt sluggish to WP7 on potato hardware. The typography based UI was both fast and very readable and focused for well thought out apps. The standardized navigation buttons (on android button order may vary be vendor/model), and the clear gesture based navigation instead of hidden intearctions everywhere (long press, 3d press, app switching gestures etc), but using gestures for in-app navigaton were all easy to understand and grasp even by the elderly.

It was readable, well organized, nobullshit, but that is not what the masses crave. Metro was like how a "dumb smartphone" should be, in my opinion.

On desktop ot didn't work well. The live tiles were still a good idea, and if the taskbar supported them, it might have been a good idea (or not, was not tried, but could have be a bit like the old NeXT style refined, not stagnated and skeumorphized like on the mac).

Microsoft's taste was "good enough". They lost because of an app ecosystem, and because of Apple's brand power, the same way beautiful Chinese shoes will lose to Nike.

Funny you mention Apple because they are proof that taste can be king. Yeah they also kidnap their users into their ecosystem and make smart business decisions, but what really differentiates them is taste. And Microsoft is sort of the counterpoint. There's more than one way to succeed I guess.

Apple's taste during the 1990's almost killed the company.

It's not that the machines were ugly or badly designed (albeit not as good as the 80s heyday), but they were unable to compete on price/performance and OS tech stack, and that in turn was making them uncompetitive in application support, which would likely have killed them.

It's an interesting alt history - who would have won with no Apple around? I reckon we'd all own a lot more Sony and Nokia gear, it's possible the Cambrian explosion of weird featurephone form factors would have carried on a lot longer, perhaps the black rectangle form factor would never have won out.

Because let's admit it, later it was a taste of one guy who got another "chance" or the company got a "chance" to be lead by him. Now as he is gone the company still carries that taste legacy with better or worse results.

Or, used to be proof.

Nokia was able to match and surpass Apple in taste on all fronts with their N9 phone and MeeGo OS. So it is possible, but how to do it I couldn't tell, since all large organizations are saturated in corruption.

Apple the company that was rescued from bankruptcy 30 years ago due to a miracle, yeah taste gets nowhere without a big bank account.

Lets see if they will mostly sell iPhones to the end of their time now.

I think the point is without taste you wouldn't even know what things should be copied out of the countless competitors. How would you even know in the first place if a competitor did a particular thing tastefully without a good sense of taste yourself?

Also, there are a lot of areas where taste will absolutely reign supreme (and has been), especially anything related to media or entertainment (books, articles, videos, games, music, etc.)

Loren Brichter [1]

Never thought of finding out who until you mentioned! What a small but fantastic contribution! Thanks Loren!!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh

PS: Think about the next evolution of it, the auto refresh (from the great apps Instagram and LinkedIn).

Did I use the word evolution right?

Id argue that auto refresh is more a successor than an evolution!

I found this post yesterday on this exact same topic. As someone who is interested in the space of creating visual things and its design choices, it's a bit disheartening to see the current situation, and brings you to the point of "why even try doing anything anymore" rather than just follow the copywagon.

I feel this will be a similar effect to the current slowdown of hiring of juniors: you're killing the pipeline of future seniors that lead development.

https://xcancel.com/shadcn/status/2085163855408214356

I can see a possible future where taste is automated. If you can effortlessly make 1000s of iterations then you can test it on real people 1000s of times. The ones that do better you keep.

Another possible future is that taste is not automated but its not part of the designer's job (if designers still exist). Instead some AI will generate 1000 of iterations and people will be employed to evaluate 100s of software UI each day for taste. These will be taste farms if you like. These people full time job will be saying yes or no.

Other possible futures also exist.

That’s interesting there was creativity experiment results proving that could be true.

https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality...

"What happens when software features, UX, and visual fidelity aren't competitive advantages anymore?"

This is the question I've been thinking about. All can be copied very easily and in scale these days.

Copying means you have a valid target.

I'd argue that a well thought UX isn't easy to copy in the first place because it's not something that can easily be put into word.

It's the same for a lot of things, I have some clothes that I love because of their, design, quality and more ... something intangible that I have hard time describing and that can easily be explained with: It was done with taste.

Ironically given how much hate I have seen for them, this is what patents are for.

Invent something novel, get patent, you have exclusive economic rights to that for however long the patent lasts.

It was always easy to copy software (but yes, even easier now). The hard part is competing with the software that you're copying. Software does not exist in a vacuum. They usually have an already established user base, relationships with partner businesses, more domain knowledge due to having to actually think about the problems they are solving and so on.

You can start by copying but at some point you'll have to differentiate, and you might not be able to do so if you don't understand how your sloppy vibe-copied software works.

That's not really what I think of when I think of taste in software development. I think of taste more in the sense of how to go about architecting something, what problems are worth solving, what technologies should be used, how to structure the code and documentation, how the APIs should function, what the scope of the thing should be, knowing what to do and what not to do, yada yada. That's all taste and LLMs suck at it (noting that taste is very subjective).

Agreed, considering "taste" to only mean UX or aesthetics is taking things too literally in my opinion.

It's not about being the only person doing it, it's about choosing to include it. Many don't know what works and what doesn't. Being able to discern a set of features that are cohesive to a smooth experience is taste. Innovating and establishing oneself as the first person to deliver those experiences is a moat in itself.

Competitors can reproduce your discernment as well, it's the sum of your product and can be equally cloned. So how is this a moat?

Because reproduction is reactive. If an organisation only clones others' style then they'll always be behind the curve and will be widely recognised to be derivative and lacking their own 'taste'.

Look how long it takes Chinese brands to transition from being clones to establishing their own corporate image.

Couldn’t disagree more. AI is a button that you press and magically get results. The ability to judge the quality of those results is “taste”.

Anyone can push the button, but not everyone can discern whether the result is a good one or not. That skill is either learned or to some extent inherent in one’s abilities.

My example I’ve been thinking about is: what will be the first new, big programming language in the age of LLMs? Theoretically, anyone could go out and make it right now. The skills and expertise required are well-encoded within all of the frontier models. The thing is, without taste, the language devolves to a useless state rather quickly. On smaller scales, I’ve seen this with API design and even object oriented design. I’ve also seen it in AI generated images and music: devoid of taste, and numbingly facile and generic.

Edit: not to toot my own horn, but “numbingly facile and generic” funny enough is probably a phrase that an LLM would never create without significant prompting to refine writing style.

Dumbest idea ever. You are composing some text in a form, or filling in fields. You want to scroll up just a little to see something out of the viewport. Oops, your little swipe is misinterpreted as a refresh gesture: the input is gone.

Yeah, it's infuriating when poorly implemented.

I think it's impossible for it not to be poorly implemented because the gesture is inherently ambiguous (or becomes so when you overload it).

I think what "poorly implemented" actually means for touch screen gestures is to be lacking the customizability to reassign or disable infuriating behaviors.

Gesture configurability is nonnegotiable: when implementing gestures, have the configuration system in place first and make sure every single behavior is tied to a preference.

Imagine if artists were embracing AI the same way coders were being forced to. All that would be left there is taste, and your argument applies as readily there as well.