Thought: Abstraction in software and business.

Abstraction, in general, makes software and businesses brittle by abstracting away the first principles, fundamentals, and bugs of the underlying system.

Abstraction makes it easier for software or businesses to get adopted. This is an incrementalist view.

However, disruption comes not from going abstract but by going deep.

New software would enable users to go deep and play with the fundamentals of the system.

For example, visualizing the data pipelines for the user or displaying the car’s location in real-time. For example, visualizing the data pipelines for the user or displaying the car’s location in real-time on Uber’s interface. This level of transparency allows users to understand and interact with the underlying processes that power the software they use.

Visualizing data pipelines can help users identify potential bottlenecks, optimize their workflows, and troubleshoot issues more effectively. Similar to the Uber’s visualization.

Another example is “bare metal software” or “naked software,” which shows what’s going on under the hood of the software being used.