…news broke that rival Meta, opens new tab is taking…
(emphasis mine)
Been awhile since I’ve seen this kind of content error.
I wonder if that’s a dictation artefact
I m optimistic, because LLMs can understand plain language. MCP won't last as the article correctly states, but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever. And companies cannot block you from doing that as long as it is your own PC / Phone.
If we do allow companies to block AI agents from accessing our own computers and data, then the users are to blame for falling again into another BigTech trap.
I think the demand for this will actually kill closed ecosystems like iOS. I feel strongly enough about this that I'm shorting Apple over it. They won't be able to get it right because every integration will have to be canned while companies giving the LLMs/users a shell will allow them to do anything. People get confused because that used to not matter, most users couldn't do anything with a shell. That's no longer the case with LLMs.
> I feel strongly enough about this that I'm shorting Apple over it.
How long do you think it will take for this to meaningfully override Apple's share price?
I think it's already starting. Apple can't produce anything people just have to have anymore because of the attitude that's causing this. You can see this in their sales numbers.
Computer use over screen and keyboard comes to the rescue
I am still mad that Facebook mostly abandoned the Open Graph protocol on their own sites.
for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :(
but yeah, in general, what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?
As other posters have said - capitalism.
But also privacy - it would be amazing to just be able to connect to any app or service you want, interact and react to stuff that's happening _over there_.
However, do you want any old app or service connecting to _your_ data, siphoning it and selling it on (and, at best, burying their use of your data in a huge terms of service document that no-one reads, at worst, lying about what they do with that information)? So you have to add access controls that are either intrusive and/or complex, or, more likely, just ignored. Then the provider gets sued for leaking data and we're in a situation where no-one dares open up.
> what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?
It got muddled into the privacy/security debate and then we all got distracted.
Capitalism happened. My hope is on regulation - I don't see any other force being capable of prying these moat cans open.
Capitalism happened. You can't extract value if the usership can flow away from your site like water.
Laughs/Cries in SAP
I have made it my mission to conquer SAP and gain control of our own critical financial data.
As a business, they uniquely leverage inefficient and clunky design to drive profit. Simply because they haven’t documented their systems sufficiently, it is “industry standard practice” to go straight to a £100/hr+ consultant to build what should be straightforward integrations and perform basic IT Admin procedures.
Through many painful late nights I have waded through their meticulously constructed labyrinth of undocumented parameters and gotchas built on foot-guns to eventually get to both build and configure an SAP instance from scratch and expose a complete API in Python.
It is for me a David and Goliath moment, carrying more value than the consultancy fees and software licences I've spared my company.
Hi, I’m a cofounder / CTO of estuary.dev. Our whole mission is democratizing and enabling use of data within orgs.
Open to a conversation about your work here? Reach me at johnny at estuary dot dev.
It's unfortunate it is your employer's IP, this shim on top of SAP would be extremely valuable if you sold as another product to enable internal teams in SAP-world corporations to develop without the knowledge of SAP arcana.
Yes I would strongly recommend monetising this, even though you'd have to rebuild it from scratch. Worth filling in a Y Combinator application?
It's inevitable. You can't afford to just provide a platform for free that someone else monetizes. I wonder what API plans are reasonable:
* Just let your users pay for API access at a per-call rate
* Charge app developer per user
The problem is that ultimately the LTV of the average user is high, but this is skewed up by the most valuable users who will switch to a different app that will inevitably attempt to hijack your userbase once they control enough of your users.
A classic example is that imgur became a social network of its own once it had enough Reddit users and only Reddit doing their own image/video hosting stemmed that bleeding.
And then there's the fact that if you choose the payment-based approaches, one app will suction the data out and compete with you for it; inevitably some user will lose his data through some app breach and blame you; and the basic app any newbie developer will build will be "yours but ad-free" which is fine for him because you're paying the development and hosting costs of the entire infra.
It's no surprise everyone converges on preventing API access. Even Metafilter does.
I'm curious if anyone has an idea for API access that can nonetheless be a successful company. Everyone's always got some idea with negative margin and negative feedback loops which they bill as "but that won't make you a billionaire" (that's true, because your company will fail) but I wonder if there is some way that could work without ruining social network network-effects etc.
Probably not. But there can be API access from a nonsuccessful noncompany - look at Fediverse or whatever.
At the end of the day, servers and software engineers cost money. One way to pay for things is ads, but ads are hostile to integrations (because there is no good way to guarantee ads will be shown) — I believe this is why Twitter and Reddit killed their third-party clients. But there are alternate ways to pay for things, e.g. subscriptions. The good news here is that the sorts of things one pays for are IMHO more likely to be the sorts of things worth MCPing together. Using MCP to post to Reddit or Twitter? Low value, to oneself and to society. Using MCP to work with one’s AWS account? Higher value.
Incidentally, why do the article’s links all use strikethrough rather than underlines? Is this a deliberate style choice, or some Chrome/Firefox/Safari incompatibility? It’s pretty ugly.
The moment MCP was announced, my first thoughts were "oh, those summer children". MPC is idyllic and not for this world.
Hacky scrapper go brrrr