Good riddance to the strategy of designing your software with subtle incompatibilities that make it hard to leave. If you’re too tyrannical someone will rewrite your stuff and you’ll be replaced.
We’re headed to a world of more viable alternatives. And companies competing on customer service. After all, putting in the energy to migrate to a one-week-old web framework isn’t in the risk appetite of most of Vercel’s customers; unless Vercel is truly distasteful as a vendor, and then people can leave with less effort than before. So the existence of vinext, even if no one moves to it, keeps Vercel more honest than a world without it.
Wonder if VCs and giant companies encourage overhiring and bloat in their (open source) products to promote first party hosting while pretending to be self hostable. Seen one product needing Docker and Auth0 to self host, but two products have leapfrogged it using plaintext+git.
Good riddance to the strategy of designing your software with subtle incompatibilities that make it hard to leave. If you’re too tyrannical someone will rewrite your stuff and you’ll be replaced.
We’re headed to a world of more viable alternatives. And companies competing on customer service. After all, putting in the energy to migrate to a one-week-old web framework isn’t in the risk appetite of most of Vercel’s customers; unless Vercel is truly distasteful as a vendor, and then people can leave with less effort than before. So the existence of vinext, even if no one moves to it, keeps Vercel more honest than a world without it.
Really good news for both consumers and business.
Wonder if VCs and giant companies encourage overhiring and bloat in their (open source) products to promote first party hosting while pretending to be self hostable. Seen one product needing Docker and Auth0 to self host, but two products have leapfrogged it using plaintext+git.
It should be noted that only was Vercel something something bad steward, but they also made it open source, including their tests.
There are many lessons to take away from this and future businesses and investors will think about this.
Not so simple - even closed source stuff can be cloned by observing its behavior.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
Previously:
How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142156