Feels like the article is just vibes and zero analysis other than “I really feel like this is true”.
Of course butter is nice, and a competitive advantage, but it’s far from obvious that it has the importance the article seems to imply. AWS isn’t butter. Roblox isn’t butter. Photoshop isn’t butter. And what’s Nurx? — I only know Epic, which certainly isn’t butter.
Seems like they're trying to rebrand "easy"; I don't think this is the insighful observation he thinks it is. And easy !== simple, which is typically what you really want and don't find out until it's too late that you didn't get it.
AWS is butter for managing servers, going by how the author mentions Stripe being butter for handling payment processors. There can be multiple layers of butter, for example Render being butter over AWS, and maybe checkout.com over Stripe.
My partner and I were talking about Quip earlier — the online document editor from 2012. It doesn’t matter how little you differentiate yourself from your competitor (Google Docs): if they suck even slightly and you don’t, people will use you instead, and you will win.
We use it at work and honestly I'd rather have Google Docs. Very limited formatting (why are there only 3 levels of headings?), very slow interface (why does it take what feels like 30s to load a folder with 25 entries in it?) and the search feature might as well not exist. When I write a Quip doc I basically have to realize and rationalize to myself that I am not going to be able to find it again in the future. So much time lost to "anyone else have the link to...". It's a black hole that allows real time collaborative editing and comments. Sometimes they'll have spells of a few hours to weeks where comments or edits are randomly lost. Randomly the UI will also pop up a 500 or 503 error, which never inspires confidence that it is actually saving my edits. I basically do all my writing in markdown locally, then copy it into Quip — both so I have a local copy I can full text search on and so that if it has one of its random fits I don't lose a half day of work.
(You can also very easily get the UI in an inconsistent state. I forget what the exact sequence is for the one I found most recently but it is something like: if you position your cursor after an image, and there is an empty line and then a line with a header, and you press forward delete, it'll get rid of both line and the header. Clicking undo won't get the header back, it'll only reappear when you refresh the page)
"Duolingo is Butter for Learning" because it prioritizes gamification and engagement over actual learning outcomes. Being joyful to use doesn't equate to effectiveness.
Of course butter is nice, and a competitive advantage, but it’s far from obvious that it has the importance the article seems to imply. AWS isn’t butter. Roblox isn’t butter. Photoshop isn’t butter. And what’s Nurx? — I only know Epic, which certainly isn’t butter.