Adobe's new image rotation tool is one of the most impressive AI tools seen

This feels extremely ungenerous to the Big Tech companies.

What's wrong with trying out 100 different AI features across your product suite, and then seeing which ones "stick"? You figure out the 10 that users find really valuable, another 10 that will be super-valuable with improvement, and eventually drop the other 80.

Especially when if Microsoft tries something and Google doesn't, that suddenly gives Microsoft a huge lead in a particular product, and Google is left behind because they didn't experiment enough. Because you're right -- Google investors wouldn't like that, and would be totally justified.

The fact is, it's often hard to tell which features users will find valuable in advance. And when being 6 or 12 months late to the party can be the difference between your product maintaining its competitive lead vs. going the way of WordPerfect or Lotus 123 -- then the smart, rational, strategic thing to do is to build as many features as possible around the technology, and then see what works.

I would suggest that if Adobe is being slower with rolling out AI features, it might be more because of their extreme monopoly position in a lot of their products, thanks to the stickiness of their file formats. That they simply don't need to compete as much, which is bad.

Force-feeding 100s of different AI features (90% of which are useless at best) to users is what's wrong with the approach.

Why?

It's not "force-feeding". You usually get a little popup highlighting the new feature that you close and never see again.

It's not that hard to ignore a new "magic wand" button in the toolbar or something.

I personally hardly use any of the features, but neither do I feel "force-fed" in the slightest. Aside from the introductory popups (which are interesting), they don't get in my way at all.

So it's ok for all of us to become lab rats for these companies?

> What's wrong with trying out 100 different AI features across your product suite, and then seeing which ones "stick"?

For users? Almost everything is wrong with that.

There are no users looking for wild churn in their user interface, no users crossing their fingers that the feature that stuck for them gets pruned because it didn't hit adoption targets overall, no users hoping for popups and nags interrupting their workflow to promote some new garbage that was rushed out and barely considered.

Users want to know what their tool does, learn how to use it, and get back to their own business. They can welcome compelling new features, of course, but they generally want them to be introduced in a coherent way, they want to be able to rely on the feature being there for as long as their own use of those features persists, and they want to be able to step into and explore these new features on their own pace and without disturbance to their practiced workflow.

Every consumer is a "lab rat" for every company at all times, if that's how you want to think about it.

Each of our decisions to buy or not buy a product, to use or not use a feature, influences the future design of our products.

And thank goodness, because that's the process by which products improve. It's capitalism at work.

Mature technologies don't need as much experimentation because they're mature. But whenever you get new technologies, yes all these new applications battle each other out in the market in a kind of survival-of-the-fittest. If you want to call consumers "lab rats", I guess that's your choice.

But the point is -- yes, it's not only OK -- it's something to be celebrated!

Think about the other side though -- if the tool you've learned and rely on goes out of business because they didn't innovate fast enough, it's a whole lot worse for you now that you have to learn an entirely new tool.

And I haven't seen any "wild churn" at all -- like I said in another comment, a few informative popups and a magic wand icon in a toolbar? It's not exactly high on the list of disruptions. I can still continue to use my software the exact same way I have been -- it's not replacing workflows.

But it's way worse if the product you rely on gets discontinued.

> What's wrong with trying out 100 different AI features across your product suite, and then seeing which ones "stick"?

Even the biggest tech companies have limited engineering bandwidth to allocate to projects. What's wrong with those 100 experiments is the opportunity cost: they suck all the oxygen out of the room and could be shifting the company's focus away from fixing real user problems. There are many other problems that don't require AI to solve, and companies are starving these problems in favor of AI experiments.

It would be better to sort each potential project by ROI, or customer need, or profit, or some other meaningful metric, and do the highest ranked ones. Instead, we're sorting first by "does it use AI" and focusing on those.

What you describe, I don't see happening.

If you look at all the recent Google Docs features rolled out, only a small minority are AI-related:

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%...

There are a few relating to Gemini in additional languages and supporting additional document types, but the vast majority is non-AI.

Seems like the companies are presumably sorting on ROI just fine. But, of course, AI is expected to have a large return, so it's in there too.

LLMs aren't profitable. There's no significant threat of a product getting discontinued because it didn't jump high enough over the AI shark.

It's popups. It's emails. It's constant nudges towards changes in workflows. Most importantly, it's accelerated the slurping of data and aggressive terms of service by an order of magnitude. Sure, in theory everyone wanted your data before, but now everyone wants all your data all the time. They want to upload it to their servers. They want to train products on it. And they want to ban you from using their product if you don't agree.

The presence or absence of some subtle new magic wand icon that shows up in the toolbar is neither making nor breaking anyone's business. And even if it comes to be a compelling feature in my competitor's product, I've got plenty of time to update my product with something comparable. At least if I've done a good job building something useful for my customers in the first place.

Generative ML technologies may dramatically change a lot of our products over time, but there's no great hole they're filling and there's basically no moat besides capital requirements that keeps competitors from catching up with each other as features prove themselves out. They just open a few new doors that people will gradually explore.

Anxiously spamming features simply betrays a lack of confidence in one's own product as it stands, directly frustrates professional users, and soaks up tons capital that almost certainly has other places it could be going.

> The presence or absence of some subtle new magic wand icon that shows up in the toolbar is neither making nor breaking anyone's business.

Sounds like famous last words to me.

The corporate landscape is filled with the corpses of companies that thought they didn't need to rush to adapt to new technologies. That they'd have time to react if something really did take off in the end.

Just think of how Kodak bided its time to see if newfangled digital photography would actually take off and when... and then it was too late.

You're comparing being 3 months behind on a supplementary software feature that's tucked among dozens of icons on the toolbar with making a hard decision about pivoting your entire megalithic industrial, research, sales, and distribution infrastructure to a radically new technology.

The discussion you started is about spamming features to see what sticks, as set against making deliberate, selective product decisions as you confidently observe your market.

It's possible that a company that ideologically sets itself against delivering any generative AI features ever might miss where the industry is going over the next 10 or 20 years. But we were never talking about that, were we?

Digital photography started out as a supplementary toy as well. And we are starting to witness a gigantic computational infrastructure pivot with GPU's and NPU's and whatnot. Google and Amazon are literally signing nuclear power plant agreements to power it. AI is a radically new technology.

Do you remember two years ago when ChatGPT came out, and people here on HN were confidently declaring it was the end of Google Search, unless Google proved they could respond immediately? And Google released Gemini less than six months later to demonstrate that Search wasn't going to go the way of Kodak, and it still took people a while to calm down after that?

And the AI revolution is moving a lot faster than the digital photography revolution. We're not talking about "the next 10 or 20 years". You seem to be severely underestimating the power of competition and technological progress, and the ability for it to put you out of business.

You're suggesting the correct approach is "deliberate, selective product decisions as you confidently observe your market." What happens when your deliberation is too slow, your selectivity turns out to be wrong, and your confidence is ill-founded? Well, the company that was willing to experiment with a lot more features is more likely to build the winning features and take over the market while you were busy deliberating.

I'm surprised to be having this conversation on HN, where the start-up ethos reigns supreme. The whole idea of the tech world is to try new things and fail fast, because it's better for everyone in the long run. That's what the big corporations are doing with AI features. Isn't that the kind of thing that tech entrepreneurs are supposed to celebrate?

No, it's way worse if the product I rely on does as you suggest and keeps adding new features just to see what will stick. I hate that sort of behavior with a passion and it is the sort of thing which will make me never do business with a company again.

Startups during their earliest stages are encouraged to throw spaghetti at the wall specifically because they don't yet have a customers to offend. They have nothing to lose from failing fast.

In the 2010's more mature companies explored adopting this same model, especially those that had themselves been founded the decade prior. What came out of it was a lot of spaghetti making a mess all over the walls, and the floors, and the ceiling. There were half-baked ideas everywhere, and a few genuine revolutions, but the quality of pretty much everything tanked.

Optimistically, we now seem to be at the starr of a pendulum swing back from that, but with little time to scrape off all the spaghetti that continues to drag everything down.

> I'm surprised to be having this conversation on HN, where the start-up ethos reigns supreme.

Many of us are sick to death of the startup ethos. We want tools that work consistently and aren't constantly changing because someone at the company got bored.

> What came out of it was a lot of spaghetti making a mess all over the walls, and the floors, and the ceiling.

I just don't know what you're talking about. What mess? What quality tanked? The picture you're painting is quite simply not what I see. Not at all, not even close.

The tools I use continue to work just fine. And I can point to tons of useful feature improvements and upgrades since the 2010's, that make a meaningful positive difference to both my productivity and my leisure. So I don't want to see companies suddenly become super-conservative in terms of releasing features. I want them to keep doing what they're doing.

You might be ok with being a lab rat, but most people are not. People buy products to satisfy their needs, not to participate in somebody else's experiment. Given the option (in the absence of monopoly) they will search for another company that treats them correctly.

Back in the olden days (10 years ago), when you bought software, you could actually keep using it indefinitely. Doesn’t matter if the company went bankrupt, if you like using Logic Pro 7 and it works with your equipment you can kept using it. I know people who only recently moved off of OS 9 - they were using creative software for over 25 years, it did what they needed it to do so they kept using it. I still know at least one person who uses Office for Mac 98 to this day on an iMac G3; it’s their only computer, but it still works and they have backups of their important documents, so why pay money to switch to an unfamiliar computer, OS, software?

This modern idea of “you’ll own nothing and you’ll like it” ruins that of course, but if someone bought CS6 they can still be using it today. If adobe went bankrupt 5 years ago they could still be legally using it today (they’d have to bypass the license checks if the servers go down, which might be illegal in the US, though). If adobe goes bankrupt tomorrow and I have a CC subscription, I can’t legally keep using photoshop after the subscription runs out.

> People buy products to satisfy their needs

People buy products for the novelty all the time. Sometimes they are disappointed with what they got, sometimes they discover new things. Take this very feature being discussed. How many people need it if Adobe released it today? How many would like what they see and decide to buy or renew?

> Given the option (in the absence of monopoly) they will search for another company that treats them correctly.

Are we still talking about product features?

There are multiple different types of users.

The users of https://notebooklm.google/ aren't the same as the users of Google Docs.