Tech Trend Prediction: The Return to Building Factories
Description
This is a screenshot of a tweet by a user named 'zane'. The tweet contains a single word, "2025", and an image. The image is a still of actor Justin Timberlake portraying Sean Parker in the 2010 film 'The Social Network'. Subtitles have been added to the image, creating a meme that paraphrases Parker's famous line from the movie. The text reads: "building b2b SAAS isn't cool. You know what's cool? building factories". The meme humorously predicts a major shift in the tech industry and venture capital focus around the year 2025. It suggests that the long-standing trend of creating Business-to-Business Software as a Service (B2B SaaS) companies will fall out of favor, to be replaced by a renewed interest in tangible, industrial projects like building factories. This reflects a growing discourse in tech circles about moving from purely digital products to 'deep tech' or 'hard tech' that addresses physical-world problems like manufacturing, supply chains, and infrastructure
Comments
19Comment deleted
The next big framework won't be written in Rust, it'll be made of it. Get ready to trade your YAML configs for OSHA compliance manuals
“Apparently the 2025 pivot plan is to replace our multi-tenant SaaS with a multi-tenant industrial park - same orchestration problems, just swapping Kubernetes nodes for CNC lathes.”
After spending a decade debugging microservices at 3am and explaining to VCs why your B2B SaaS has negative unit economics, suddenly the idea of building something tangible that doesn't require a Kubernetes cluster to manufacture a single widget starts looking pretty cool indeed
Ah yes, because nothing says 'I've made it' quite like implementing the Factory pattern for the 47th time while your B2B SaaS competitors are busy solving actual customer problems and achieving product-market fit. But hey, at least your object instantiation is elegantly abstracted - that'll really impress the VCs when they ask about your MRR. The real irony? Most successful SaaS platforms are built on mountains of factory patterns anyway, they just don't lead with it in their pitch decks
2025: Graduating from B2B SaaS to factories - same distributed systems and queueing theory, except rollbacks need a crane and the SLA is takt time
SaaS moats: network effects and patents. Factory moats: chain-link fences and guard dogs
2025: we pivoted from ARR to OEE - turns out you can roll back a deploy, but not a 300 mm wafer
Abstract factories??? Comment deleted
https://www.factorio.com/ Comment deleted
I'm doing my part! 🫡 Comment deleted
Tracing a PCB? Comment deleted
Just killing bugs Comment deleted
"First actual case of bug being found" This? Comment deleted
love em Comment deleted
I hoped it was a meme about reorientation of the economy towards real value and national movements directed against uncontrolled offshoring (like "Made in America", "France 2030", etc). Apparently it is just another meme about a computer game. Comment deleted
Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder Comment deleted
Though I would need to take a major shift into political discussion so we can have a serious discussion about it. No simple solution to uncontrolled offshoring exist atm for non-Asian countries with too high salaries and too excessive regulations Comment deleted
I'm doing my part, too! Comment deleted
Mmm, the genocide of the bugs... Lovely Comment deleted