This is a wild thing to say. Brand age watches don't look strange. They look beautiful. Incredible thought and care and intention is put into their design. The people who buy them love them. It's so funny to me to get this far into one of PGs blogs and sort of realise "Oh right, you don't actually understand beauty". It's very hard to read this as much more than a slightly autistic man not understanding that it's ok for people to like beautiful things. It is not worth it to me to spend £100k on a watch, but I don't deny it is to other people, I'm not going to pretend the watch is undesirable.
But it does make me wonder whether Paul things that YC is successful today because it has a better design than other startup programmes, or is it successful today because of it's brand?
Culture shapes our taste. Companies pursue on multi-decade billion-dollar campaigns to shape our culture. We like certain things because famous actors or athletes endorse them; because hip hop artists rap about them; because influencers talk about them; because Hollywood portrays them a certain way. This extends to all form of modern aesthetic preferences from architecture to watches to cars to furniture to dating.
I think the argument pg is making is that brand-obsessed cultures are not maximally truth/beauty-seeking and gets really weird. e.g. Japanese Ohaguro, Chinese foot binding, various cranial deformation practices from the Mayans to the Huns, high-heels, ugly (to outside observers) watches.
I think it's a really thought-provoking essay. But it's too heterodox and "autistic" to share with most of my friends. Socially speaking, it's best to outwardly embrace the current zeitgeist.
It looks like an Aliexpress Timex.
Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?) and, of course, there are lines outside "luxury" brands like Louis Vuitton. Why bother?
PS I'll stick to my Casios: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/06/the-discreet-charm-of-infrastru...
Lines outside Louis Vuitton are more down-market, aspirational luxury - an ultra-wealthy person wouldn't be caught dead queuing on a sidewalk. Patek and Ferrari operate at the level above, where the signal isn't wealth but access. (HBS calls Ferrari's version "deprivation marketing.")
Is it a game worth bothering with? Enough people think so to sustain billion-dollar brands.
(Of course, PG writing an essay about being too smart for fancy watches - while knowing a lot about them - is its own signaling game, just aimed at a different audience)
Stealthy, like a submarine.
From a birds-eye view it's less a hedonistic treadmill and more a feeding frenzy.
It's a game you can play, but for the life of me, I cannot comprehend why you'd want to, there are so many other better things in life.
>>> Why bother?
Exactly - go give someone you love a hug, that's worth infinitely more than flexing an expensive watch.
They might pass the time doing those things, but not as a mere passtime or hobby, like if they were sewing or playing CoD. Unlike those, doing them and telling about doing them serves a specific social purpose.
But I don't view hobbies as that separate from status signals within the hobbying group. Oh you play games? What games? Did you beat it? etc etc.
Esoteric knowledge/practices here are status signls (Oh you reached shattered planet without xyz??).
That starts to sound a lot like "Oh you aquired a lambo XYZ without usual steps abc" and that's a really fun convo in the in-group, and a total miss with the out-group.
The difference though is that this is not meant to serve "within the hobbying group".
They serves the status signal purpose when showing them to "laymen" and other rich people in general, not necessarily to other expensive car buyers or luxury watch buyers.
In other words, the, typically quiet, flaunting, is done to people otherwise uninterested about the specific ting, that nonetheless recognize the exclusivity and the knowledge that it's a subtle signal of "elevated taste" and that they belong to the tasteful-rich club.
(Well, the way that _some_ people play Magic: The Gathering does - but I wouldn't want to play with anyone who raised a stink about proxies)
As for fonts etc: https://hobancards.com/blogs/thoughts-and-curiosities/americ...
This could be explained away by them working for the same place and assuming to contact them you call the same switchboard and ask for the person, but even back in the 90s it would have been strange for wall street "Vice Presidents" (even if it was somewhat of a ceremonial title) to not have their own unique business number.
Also, Paul Allen giving his card to someone else with the same contact number for the purposes of being in touch to plan to play squash doesn't make much sense unless you get meta and assume Paul Allen was aware this had no practical value and just wanted to ego-drop the card.
I've got three Oceanus watches (Casio's boutique brand). I never wear them, anymore, because of Apple Watch.
I brought a couple of them in Japan. There, the G-Shock brand is very popular. They sell G-Shock watches for ridiculously (to Americans, who are used to cheap G-Shocks) high prices.
Apart from the KYC aspect of the process it's their way of solving the problem of artificial scarcity on the second-hand market as the article explains. They want a second hand market to exist to indicate that this is a luxury item, but too many and the price tanking with excess supply.
What a tired aphorism. Just like PG's 50 year old insights.
This status-through-martyrdom ritual to get it from retail at MSRP is utterly bizarre.
[1] https://www.chrono24.com/patekphilippe/nautilus--mod106.htm
I feel bad for the folks who pick up on stuff like this, that must be a heavy weight to bear constantly comparing yourself to other people.
A classic case is when you observe teenager targeted status signalling trends. This can be as low value as an expensive shirt, ie shirts branded ‘supreme’ costing $300 which isn’t worth signalling to anyone who pays rent or a mortgage. But to a teenager? Wow man $300! such status!!! On the flip side if we see someone above teenager age wearing such teenager targeted status symbols we reasonably subconsciously assume they live with their parents and have very little income.
This continues up the wealth chain forever. Status symbols are invariably a way to see just how little people actually have because the person wearing the status symbol clearly believes the value of what they are flaunting is impressive.
Status symbols aren’t a signal of how much money you have so much as signal of what you believe to be an incredible amount of wealth to flaunt.
You can have that heavy weight while living on the suburbs or even the ghetto too. The objects are prices mostly change with the wealth level, not the game.
ego, of course
This is so silly. Do you really not have any hobbies where you spend inordinate time or money on things you could objectively accomplish quicker and cheaper, but having less fun, in other ways? Like, I ski. It’s a silly way to get up and down a hill in the 21st century.
I’m not a watch guy. But mechanical watches are beautiful. There are idiots who buy them. But that doesn’t mean everyone who does is an idiot.
At least with cars or audio equipment there's some marginal benefits once you get to crazy numbers, not the case with watches.
A watch at $80,000 is what, 10,000x what a new cheap one is?
But good for them! It’s really hard to be angry at them for buying said watch without it being some form of jealousy.
Sure. To each their own. I drive a Subaru. I don’t think it’s weird that others like a nice car. (I also think there are douchebags who drive both.)
Hobbes: …
Calvin: A good shirt turns the wearer into a walking corporate billboard!
Hobbes: …
Calvin: It says to the world, “My identity is so wrapped up in what I buy that I paid the company to advertise its products!”
Hobbes: You’d admit that?
Calvin: Oh, sure. Endorsing products is the American way to express individuality.
Sounds a hell of a lot like the diamond industry. Also, the top fashion houses, but both industries are taking a drubbing from artificial competition (artificial diamonds, and knockoffs, of various stripes).
I'm a believer in branding. I worked for many years, for a company with a "top-shelf" brand, and saw what it took, to maintain. But it takes a huge amount of discipline and "silly" stuff. Brand damage can come from a million different directions. I have found very few people are willing to do what it takes to maintain a top brand.
For quite a while, there have been "brand-only" products, like Von Dutch, or Life Is Good™. They are the two-dollar hat, with the twenty-dollar logo. Like Izod Lacoste or Members Only, in the last century.
Sometimes, you can't fight it, but other times, trying to correct can only make things worse.
This is where having sober, experienced PR people and CEOs comes into play. There's no "textbook" way to deal with this stuff. It is different, each time, so you need smart leaders (something in short supply, these days).
The company that I worked for, was a camera company. One of their brand-protection strategies, was to have as much control as possible over any images made public from their cameras.
They went waaaaaay out of their way to help photographers get the best results, and it was a bitch to get test images from prerelease kit.
[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/corona-urine-rumor-cou...
Comparing with luxury watches which cost a magnitude or two more and are beaten in precision by a $10 casio.
I guess the thing to watch out is technical stagnation and "good enough"?
Not that Apple's only appeal is marketing, Mac laptops certainly have pros over the bottom and mid tier Windows laptops. But having seen that video, and knowing that other have seen it, are aware of Apple and its positioning, makes people feel better while using and owning their devices.
People absolutely want that feeling and they're willing to pay for it.
Macbook Neo customers want Apple to put out creative product marketing videos, they believe it is part of the offer.
Branding is not inherently unproductive, nor is it guaranteed to produce worse watches. They may be larger and less accurate, but consumers still (evidently) find value in the brand. A Grand Seiko or a Nomos or a Patek is perhaps now even more interesting & identity-productive than a watch was in the 60s.
As technologists I think we're prone to dismissing improvements that aren't engineering-backed. But all life is storytelling, and labeling that work as "button-pushing" is… dismissive, to say the least.
For some product types there is no better alternative, like ISPs. But I'd argue this is because of monopoly, which is different from brand. Most monopolies (like ISPs) usually have negative brands, and there's no alternative not because one can't create a better brand (that's easy), but because the upfront cost to become profitable is too high.
The other part of the story is swatch is also quite successful at the shit tier watches as well.
So this article misses the point really.
not sure what tfa is trying to say here, but this is far from being an indictment of the current age. the term "golden age" is (from what I've seen) usually used for the time when an industry or field was taking the leap from niche to mainstream, and in the process defining some of the things that would later come to be considered characteristic. by that token, of course the golden age of watchmaking is not today - the field has already gone mainstream and indeed does retain a lot of the characteristic features that the golden age innovated upon and defined.
* https://bookshop.org/p/books/no-logo-no-space-no-choice-no-j...
P.S.: It is odd to me to have such a length pg essay been up for such a long time with just a handful of comments. Did something happen? I would've expected a wealth of discussion on a post like this by now.
yeah they were force merged with ETA, longines, Hamilton and eterna, which basically dominated the swiss watch industry .
Patek Phillipe was all about just being expensive with other people's movements. They were the balenciaga of watches (subjective view point there.)
> But you could recognize one from across the room.
and
> Or maybe not so lucky.
and starting a paragraph with
> For men, at least.
The ability to transfer a lot of money in the physical shape of brand watches costing 200k per piece may have added to their appeal. AppleTV’s show Friends and Neighbours upselling their value as Jon Hamm tries to steal them from neighbours may be product placement. But these were all tactics from the 50s and 60s where relatively few media sources meant you could buy your way into the hearts of the masses with an ads campaign.
Today we have a massively accelerated pace of society burning through fads and information - largely due to social media. The artificial scarcity trick is no longer an MBA secret. A brand, especially an AI brand, can burn in and out of favor in days. Transparency in society helps maybe bring out authenticity. Advertising of the past was often “advertising to your weaknesses” and that game is over.
If we can structure the transparency and apply it to politicians and other less transparent institutions that count on “Brand” to the list (especially ones with high margins and large networks) maybe the world will see true competition that benefits everyone more. Lack of transparency (and liqidity, and availability) are what make trust bubbles that distort markets.
Really interesting parallel between decidedly traditional technology and today.
If the business really mainly on the technical merits of the product/service, even blank brand is an option. Many brand as a façade to a single plant is a different tradeoff.
Commoditized software is here. Will there be a market for high-end, luxury software? Becoming an artificially scarce veblen good is unlikely to work for digital goods the way it has for watches.
Funny thing is, I'm not sure anyone is actually doing either thing successfully. Every time I've looked into an openclaw success story it's ended up being complete fiction.
Software. everyone can do it now. but you still buy lets say Crowdstrike for security, because is in your brain for years as security software.
Wow, that is… not what I would recommend. Brand is one of the few things that will give you pricing power in the age of AI.
My only question about this entire essay is... where did this time traveler came from???
"Our" time traveler was never mentioned until this line.
> The best way to answer that might be to imagine what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine. [...] The first thing he'd notice, if he walked through a fancy shopping district, is that all the prominent watchmakers of the golden age seem to be doing better than ever.
However swatch group(omega was force merged in the 80s to form the swatch group) has 3x the turnover of Patek.
More over Swatch caters to both high end and the poors + kids. So brand is.. good? so long as you only cater for the rich? I'm not getting that really.
If you have to explain why your product is expensive, maybe it shouldn’t be.
Respectfully disagree.
Since the 60's (and one could argue, even long before that), watches are 1) fashion, and 2) male wealth-signaling fashion. That's it. Nothing more. And for males who subscribe to this wealth-signaling cult, they know from a long way away what watch brand is on that guy's wrist.
Okay, today's brands signal maybe a little differently than just wealth. Casio G-Shock watches aren't substantially different than their non-G-Shock counterparts in any significant way, but they cost way more. The G-Shock brand signals... I dunno, sportsy-ness? Maybe it is closer to a pure fashion brand here.
I think we've been in "The Brand Age" since the advent of advertising. There are plenty of products that have virtually no differentiation besides brand, and there (almost) always has been.
No, they didn’t. The makers of movements and makers of cases were separate. From far away you only know the case on the wrist. Not the movement. (I think Rolex was the first mass-market Swiss watch brand to vertically integrate. Patek may have been the first boutique.)
The movement was the expensive part. Audemars, Vacheron and Patek only made movements. The retailer would then put it in a case. That’s the entire point of PG’s essay.
> if you couldn't tell them apart, they wouldn't be any good at signaling, the entire point of wearing them
Which might lead you to revise your hypothesis around why these watches were bought and made in the “golden age of watches.” Then as now there is such a thing as quiet luxury.
I don't think thats really true, Audemars & Patek deffo made entire watches in the 50s.
Don't get me wrong they also designed movements, but by the time of the quartz crisis, Patek bought in movements from outside.
It doesn't really help that omega and tissolt were merged with Certina, ETA, hamilton when then turned into swatch, which basically dominates the entire swiss watch industry along with rolex and richemont(who own Vacheron)
The watch manufacturer, as part of their reputation, buys “premium” internal components. And then the hardcore watch-heads get to know that this model has that premium movement. Everybody in the club gets to signal to each other by knowing internal details that outsiders don’t notice (or even details that can’t be noticed, I mean, I assume by nowadays non-premium-brand movements are functionally identical to the premium ones).
G-Shock says “I do things that are so dangerous and so off the grid your Rolex or Apple Ultra would shatter and die”. And it’s true, out of my whole collection, that’s the one that will still be within a ms of true time 25 years after the power goes out after the nukes go off.
I own (among other, nicer time pieces) a G-Shock. I bought it when I was in the military and frankly it's a great watch that has withstood some serious abuse. Maybe a cheaper watch would have also survived? I'd happily buy another but mine's still literally and figuratively ticking.
There are brands for non-rich: Linux is a very strong brand but virtually free and non-exclusive at all (think Android phones). Patriotism and country reputation might also be thought as brands. E.g. would Portugal's tourist boom happen without the Portuguese tarts popularity?
Edit: my watch is a Pebble.
It is possible to view the fact that capitalist markets can turn a desire for art, individuality, and "something special" into a business as a bad thing. I'm not entirely convinced that's particularly interesting, though... it seems just a localized restatement of a generic "capitalism is bad" take.
- This change of what used be a functional object into a brand was done to appeal to one-upmanship (my watch is more expensive than yours) rather than the aesthetic urge which drives appreciation for art. He doesn't blame the watch brands, it may have been the only way they could survive after the triple shock. But..
- If you're an engineer and techie type and are drawn to the complexity and mechanistic elegance of mechanical watches, he's warning you that the problems being worked on in the brand age actually take you away from good functional design which attracted you there in the first place.
What people usually mean when they talk about differentiation is distinctiveness [1]. Design isn't a differentiator for these watches it's about being distinctive. At the end of the day when telling the time is commoditized, and expensive watches are just a status symbol it's all you've got.
[1] - https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/differentiat...
I asked Claude to psychoanalyze why I got obsessed with them and it said I’m likely striving for something tangible that appeals to my engineer mindset that isn’t now obsolete in the age of AI. It’s my career’s existentialism.
It's also a sales tactic - a watch can be a schelling point if you're looking to network with someone who's into it.
2000s brought Hiphop bling culture to them which embraced maximalism with size further increasing and 85 diamonds and rubies being something worthy of showing.
2010s austerity led to a retreat all the way to 1940s style trench and dress watches, cases back to 38mm.
Post Covid, boldness is having a comeback. See the newest Planet Ocean. We are seeing bling and ostentatious gold again on celebrities this year.
He does not disappoint. Also, not buying the watch industry parable.
(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economi...
EDIT: Nevermind comments are apparently just a pg meta discussion..
Because looking at Truth Social and Gab, people do adopt brands as part of their identity; and Uber but for drivers, or Facebook, without the spying, are trivial to make the software side of things on now. The fact that we haven't seen a dozen Uber competitors spring up is a testament to the fact that branding is a helluva moat. It's impossible to put a dollar value on it, but ChatGPT has no moat, except that it's Chat-fucking-GPT. The original chatbot and no matter how good Claude gets, it'll never be the original.
Some of them will. And I suspect the set of markets in which they do will only increase—traditional SWE is probably dying, hard as that is to accept. But the fundamentals of engineering and business are nowhere close to going away. And those are the actually-hard parts of business.
The New Coke brand failed because people didn't like the taste, not the other way around.
I drink Diet Coke, which is basically the same formula that became New Coke with chemical sludge instead of sugar, and it tastes pretty good to my tongue to the point where I drink it over Coke Zero, the one closer to "the real thing".
No, you couldn’t. At best you’d turn out a video game simulating Uber. The idea that all of the business is in its software seems to be one Silicon Valley perennially unlearns.
I've noticed a significant tone and demographic shift on the site over the past 2-3 years with more Western Europeans and Midwesterners and fewer Bay Area+NYC users, and fewer decisionmakers or decisionmaking adjacent people using the site.
And the deeply technical types who used HN largely shifted to lobste.rs.
Karrot_Kream (another longtime HN user) identified this shift as well [0]
There's also a tension between the increasing "community building" happening on HN and the Bay Area/NYC crowd. A lot of them have an extant community largely based on in-person relationships. The more HN builds its own community, the more you alienate this set of people. In other words, Slashdotification is happening more and more to HN where a set of very online tech people who don't really make decisions generate most of the chatter on this site.
The reality is, most people are in-person now and conversations that were happening on HN because of the pandemic are now being done offline.
Blind is toxic, but at least the users are cynically realistic.
The very same people who would be flagging that comment wouldn't bat an eye at saying they won't read or support anything by folks like DHH, or a hundred other prominent tech figures who have committed some ideological-wrong.
It's just a similarly heavy-handed reaction from the other side of the divide.
I don't find anything wrong or downvotable about people voicing perfectly valid criticisms about pg, his opinions, who he associates with and signal-boosts...unless these standards you all want to apply wrt cancellation are "for thee and not for me".
First off, you might be right for some small number of cases, but I’d flag any and all rants such as this, regardless of the target. Off-topic, and doesn’t contribute to the conversation.
Second, for those as you describe, when they go off on an off-topic rant about DHH, someone else will conveniently flag it.
You have no way of knowing that. The guidelines against off-topic controversy and generic tangents apply, no matter who the author.
We acknowledge this message board is the rightful unceded home of the startup enthusiast people. We affirm their right to it and recognize their sovereignty.
See, you enjoy me bringing pet subject into discussion with nebulous relation? You want always to see it? Good. I will do so. No downvote it unfair.
