Only Taste can save you

A while ago, I saw a famous interview with Steve Jobs that looked like it was shot in the 90s. His head was full of hair still, not yet gray.

In it, Jobs was talking about his lifelong rival, Microsoft, with an almost sad voice. Although I don’t know when the interview was, given that Apple never beat Microsoft at any metric until somewhat recently, I’m almost certain he was the loser in the relationship at the time.

“The problem with Microsoft is, they just have no taste”, Jobs said. “They have absolutely no taste”.

Now of course he was 100% right and still is to this day. I’ve ranted extensively online about why Microsoft sucks, but the reason they and so many other companies were able to create terrible products is much less talked about.

For one, Microsoft is the OG. The incumbent. The first one to do stuff, and that’s amazing. It’s important. One bad Excel update would most likely break the entire societal order as we know it.

But even more so, it’s because writing software is hard. Creating products is really difficult! Who would’ve thunk!

So, you have historically either needed a large team and tons of money, or one cracked dev and tons of time. Even then, without marketing and distribution, chances of success were near zero.

The latter has been lowering for over a decade now, with indie hackers and small software companies using social media as distribution to varying degrees of success. The former has just recently started to break down with the advent of AI tools like Cursor, v0 and Lovable.

So, in an era where distribution is easy, and tools are constantly lowering the barrier to building products, how can software companies stand out?

Easy. Taste.

Now, picture this.

The year is 2014 and you’re browsing Tumblr or Vimeo, as one did back during the mustache era. When Instagram had cringy filters and a chronological timeline.

If you were even mildly tech-inclined, you would’ve seen a video of European hipsters walking the streets of Barcelona, asking them to fill out a form on an iPad that, per the authors, feels like a conversation.

Or you would’ve seen this one, with fun IRL shots mixed in with Typeform’s original UI.

They were one of the first to implement a strategy that has separated winners and losers over the past 11 years: something that already exists (like forms) but good, easy and good looking.

This was not a new idea, with Apple making personal computers good and good looking for decades now, but since Typeform many a startup have followed suit.

Most recently the likes of Raycast, Linear, Framer and Perplexity have embraced this notion (another one!) that you can have an opinion. Your company can do things, do them well, and add their personality to it through taste.

Now that all it takes is a prompt to vibe-code your way to a fully functional SaaS, engineering is less of a moat and distribution has been getting easier for over a decade now.

Now that AI makes the most basic parts easier, only one thing can save you: taste.