Yup. This. Two kinds of people in this context. Ones who panic before a disaster and ones who panic after letting it happen. Bonus points to the latter for celebrating their fuckup.
Sorry, I was unclear. I’m pointing out that the “pants shitting panicking” is why Y2K was a nothingburger.
The options are panic before (in a rush to fix it) or panic after (to repair damage that could have been prevented). (Of course there is a third option, detect your problem sooner, but that isn’t always available.)
So yeah, if someone at Ford had panicked about the Pinto’s fuel system before they shipped, they wouldn’t have had to panic about it afterwards.
Such a throw back, I built a hackintosh back in x86 days and had it mostly working for a year, but of course tried to apply an update (10.08 I think?) and it blew up.
Ended up selling the hardware to some guy who insisted he would get it working and I am sure it was possible, but I pretty much switched to using Mac after that as I loved the dev experience.
Things got much better with OpenCore. Sometimes you had to tweak a few extra settings, but generally you could update it just like a regular Mac. Point updates worked especially well.
I had OSX running on an old school flip-screen HP tablet/laptop combo with touchscreen support. It was bulky but cool to use as a drawing tablet in the pre-iPad days. You did need to have a paper clip inserted into two holes of the VGA port for it to work, and I don't think it handled sleep very well. But still a fun project.
IT Sovereignty is likely to be a growing trend after the past few years - including issues of Election interference not just by governments but by individual Tech CEOs. I think a lot of particularly Europeans have realized that putting all your eggs in American jurisprudence might -not- be the best way to go.
Cloudflare has a moat but it already smells like sewage.
Cloudflare is not competing with app builders like Lovable or Repl though. They are the underlying infrastructure for companies like that. This is why they will win in the AI era.
They're saying that it's trivial for Cloudflare to go up the stack (build Replit) while it's non-trivial for Replit to go down the stack (build Cloudflare).
Cloudflare is competing with Akamai, and a few other core delivery and WAF infrastructure companies and services provided by the big cloud providers. Not some content hosting outfit.
By this logic every single company on the planet would be a single-product company. The reality is that companies expand their offerings all the time – despite the cost, complexity, and risk of doing so.
A great time to expand your offerings is when there's an adjacent offering that's producing outsized returns for someone else, is easily replicable, and which you have an asymmetric advantage on.
I think everyone knows that when someone says "it's trivial" for a business to do something, it doesn't mean it's actually trivial. Doing anything of any value anywhere is non-trivial. It's shorthand for "doing Activity X is almost certainly achievable with an acceptable outlay of risk for Business Y."
> By this logic every single company on the planet would be a single-product company.
This is absolutely not true, and proof that you completely misunderstood what I said.
You took an upmarket B2B infrastructure company and compared it to a low-end B2B/B2C software company. That is a completely different type of business.
Cloudflare launches new products and offerings all the time - and all B2B within their market space. The difference is that if they did what you suggest (make a Lovable), it would put them in a position of competing with their own customers, and it would have a chilling effect on selling more infrastructure to other companies who would then fear competition as well. It's not that they can't do it. It's that it is not wise for them to do so, and it's a different type of business entirely.
As I understand it, very little of Replit and Lovable (especially) are actually B2C. A lot of it is internal teams at mid-sized companies, which are a huge and demonstrably very fruitful customer segment, and one that Cloudflare does in fact serve already.
Cloudflare has already started releasing products that point in this direction. Not sure how far they will (or should) go, but it's really not categorically ridiculous or impossible or nonsensical, as you're implying.
And the reason for Cloudflare to do it is because there are several (apparently) very juicy businesses to be built by slapping a chat UI and off the shelf coding agent on top of Cloudflare infra... Not saying they should do this, but the rationale is pretty self-evident.
The reason for Replit to try going down the stack is platform risk and compressing margins from competitors who also have the brilliant idea of slapping a text box and off the shelf coding agents onto Cloudflare.
Neither are trivial but I would wager cloudflare is the easiest to replace because it's the most mechanical and price sensitive.
It's like VPN service. Some other party comes along and offers it at 40% of the cost, you can do that.
Lovable is more nuanced. It takes more to move away, and there's just no reason to. The unit cost of Lovable buyeres is negligible aka less buyer sensitivity
LMAO you have it complete upside down, and if you think Lovable is a 'wrapper' around AI maybe you should try building a working app.
Lovable is a layer of abstraction, becoming as as complex as Shopify.
"It takes decades to build the kind of network cloudflare has."
It takes literally no time. Cloudflare's network could be emulated with proper planning and enough budget, and turned on instantly. 'Servers in 300 cities' is a medium sized challenge, but most importantly, it's a relatively clear path.
On the customer side, Cloudflare (in most cases) could be replaced as quickly as individuals replace their VPNs.
Shopify for example is ' just some siple HTML and checkout' - of course not - they are dominant and growing because there's a lot of complex interdependence, switching costs are much higher, their buyers are less technical and much less likely to want to change, and building a Shopify replacement involves hitting a lot of checkmarks.
Lovable started as a wrapper just as Shopify started with something simple, but they've quickly evolved.
AWS could snap their fingers and decide to knock out Cloudflare, it's a 'Commodity Plus' that came to the fore in a time when a specific need was there, and now people are turning to it out of convenience.
Of Lovable, Wix, Shopify, Figma, Stripe - Cloudflare is in the riskiest position because of the inherent commoditizability of their tech and the relatively low switching costs.
Shopify's core offer is a very long gnarly tail with any number of detail and moving parts, a massive eco system of 3rd party vendors, integations, and developer community.
Their service is sticky and switching costs are high.
It would literally cost more in Claude Code tokens to hack a prototype, than to sign up and host Shopify and get 100x the features. It's $0 to build the prototype and $1/mo to literally have a full product for the first 3 months.
At the same time, Claude Code can build you a full variation of Cloudflare's core product, and with less than $1M you can scale across 300 regions if you really put your mind to it.
During the dot-com boom, Cisco was the underlying infrastructure of the Internet. A lot of investors that believed themselves to be savvy bought Cisco stock. Their reasoning was that individual dot-com startups may go under, but the Internet itself was here to stay. In practice, the Cisco stock price peaked in March 2000, and anyone who invested at the peak would not have broken even (in nominal dollars, not real dollars) until December 2025.
The investors were right that the Internet would be important, and that Cisco would continue to be an important manufacturer of networking infrastructure. This just fundamentally did not matter because after the dot-com bubble popped, the market decided that Cisco simply wasn't worth the price it was selling at during the height of the bubble.
Our designer uses some some of open-source Lovable. I don't remember the name, it's just pointed to our liteLLM gateway. A dev helped him with the setup, so there's still a bit of value in lovable's "it just works", but it's so much cheaper someone is bound to eat their lunch.
In an April 2002 interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, reflected on investors paying 10x revenue for Sun stock at its dot-com peak ($64/share in 2000):
At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don't need any transparency. You don't need any footnotes. What were you thinking?
Now this analysis is imperfect... but it's good enough.
That assumes 100% of Internet can or would be willing to adopt Cloudflare, which has no real basis.
The EU is finally waking up to the fact that putting all its eggs in the U.S. basket is a bad thing. China is enormous, and they're not going to go all in on Cloudflare either for a myriad of reasons. And a bunch of folks just don't like nor want to do business with the company and its CEO.
What does that even mean? Revenue is measured in dollars not in % of internet traffic. They could "own" 100% of internet traffic and still have growing revenue.
Disclaimer that I'm a long-term Cloudflare holder, and that I've also sold NET in the past year.
I empathize with this view, however it is very hard to value businesses that have extremely high margins, and who grow revenue very quickly on existing products while they're adding additional products.
I don't think NET is a steal at 39x revenue. But at no point in the last 5 years has NET been available to purchase for <15x revenue [1].
During that time, it has had Gross Margins in the exceptional range of 70%-75%, and YoY quarterly revenue growth in the similarly exceptional range of 25-40%, which has increased in our post-AI agent software economy.
If you're a Ben Graham acolyte, you would have sat out of NET since it's IPO. However, if you're a Charlie Munger/Buffet admirer who understands the pivotal role NET plays in the software ecosystem (i.e. it's inside your "circle of competence"), you'd do well to consider the Mungerism:
"Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices. Instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices."
That still leaves as an exercise to the reader what a "fair price" is for NET, but (to me, at least) it's clearly a wonderful business.
I’m saying that 1/5th of global internet traffic runs through their servers. Period. Thats significant and if anything shows that there’s potentially a lot more opportunity.
Ever looked at MSFT or AAPL’s dividends? It’s a token “here’s your fucking dividend, now go away” percentage. (I’m sure it’s actually to placate funds that require a dividend, but I repeat myself.)
As a retired ‘softie, my spouse still holds a fair bit of MSFT, so I just looked: $0.98…on a $540.00 stock. Yeah, we won’t be living off that in our old age.
Why would you want a dividend? It’s mathematically better for a business to do share buybacks and allow investors to choose when to sell shares so they can minimize tax liability.
Australia has one of, if not the highest rates of CGT in the world.
ASX dividend stocks are popular with retirees in particular because the dividends are fully franked, meaning you get a credit for the tax already paid on the dividends by the company.
If you’re in a low enough tax bracket, this can turn into a tax refund if the tax the company paid exceeds your own personal tax liability.
Given how much people have started actively looking for alternatives, and how much spray-and-pray Cloudflare's offerings now seem with so many launches every few weeks, steal is a bit too optimistic.
Bot's enable discovery of information or exploits at a scale that we cannot imagine.
Recent example of a breach, they are now using AI to decomp APKs and iOS apps, mainly old builds of apps that nobody would bother spending the time on previously to look for secret keys or accidental information disclosure.
This would have been immensely time consuming with each app usually doing things a bit differently (e.g. encrypted + compiled settings, keys in database, settings in a settings.json).
Now you can automate the entire pipeline, this is actively being used to look for legacy API endpoints that may not be hardened or monitored, or if you don't rotate your keys and at one point disclosed them.
Dang, that’s tough. Recently having to deal with php2shell was a good wake-up call for anybody doing hosting of any kind. Next few years gonna be rough (but food on the table for cybersecurity experts I guess)
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