Hey everyone. Welcome back to Old School New Tech. I'm your host, Ran Aroussi, and today I want to talk about something that's been on my mind lately, and it might make some of you uncomfortable. It's, about the difference between real progress and just pretending to make progress. But before that, I want to mention that this episode is brought to you by Automaze, My agency, that's a full service technology partner for startups and businesses that need more than just code auto. Automaze's CTO as a service, combines strategy, engineering, and startup thinking without the cost or complexity of hiring full-time CTO or a dev team. To learn more about how we can help ambitious founders visit automaze.io All right, let's dive in. Let me take you back to 1997. Picture this, i'm running a small web development agency, and clients would literally come to me and say, and I'm not making this up"make me an internet". That was the entire belief. Just make me an internet. I remember, one day we were sitting in this corporate boardroom of major retail chain with, uh, glossy brochures everywhere, awards on the walls, very expensive art as well. They even brought in the CEO to impress us. Their big revolutionary move into the digital age was. They wanted to put their entire product catalog online. That's it. Customer would still have to call in orders or physically show up at the branches. They thought they were crushing it, But sitting there, I had a feeling that they were already dead and years later, I was proven right. Amazon was coming, eBay was coming, Shopify was on the horizon. The entire business model was about to get vaporized. But in their minds, they have already done the internet. You know, they checked the box, they moved on. That's not progress. That's the illusion of progress, and you can see it everywhere. Let's take Nokia for example. We love to mock Nokia and Blackberry for missing the iPhone revolution. We all tend to think that they were asleep at the wheel, but here's the thing, they weren't asleep at the wheel because when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, Nokia's, CFO actually said, and I quote. This launch would benefit us. The iPhone will expand the market and people will choose our N95. They thought they had it covered. They were making improvements, they were adding features. They were iterating over their designs, but they were stuck in that same illusion. You see, the winners that were emerging weren't just adding mobile features to their existing products. They were becoming mobile. Think about it. Uber wasn't possible without GPS a touch screen and an app store in everyone's pocket. They weren't mobile enabled. They weren't a taxi with a mobile app. They were mobile. That's a massive difference. There's a famous quote by Henry Ford, you may have heard before. He said, if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. And that's the trap right there. A lot of companies are focusing on incremental improvements, making things faster, cheaper, shinier, which is great, But this approach also comes with the risk of missing that tectonic shift that's happening right beneath their feet, another example is that when Thomas Addison lit up, Manhattan back in, the 1880s, he imagined maybe a few thousands of light bulbs, at peak demand. That was the grand vision. He couldn't even picture washing machines or televisions, microwaves, computers. He definitely didn't see how electricity would reshape society itself, enabling women to enter the workforce. Teenagers, spending the entire summers glued to PlayStations. And that's the thing with real revolutions, it's easy to see the first domino brick fall, but we can't imagine the avalanche that will follow. And the reason I'm mentioning all of this is because we are now in 2025 and. It seems to me that the make me an Internet of the nineties has become, make me an ai and you can see it everywhere. Companies rolling out these cute little AI side projects so the CEO can tell the board on their next quarterly meeting. Don't worry, we are doing ai. We're there. It's the modern version of that, product catalog website. And look, there's nothing wRang with experimenting. We should all be experimenting pretty much always. The danger is when we mistake it for actual transformation. And when I'm really honest with myself, when I ask if my own company has truly changed because of ai. The answer is not enough. And we're a company that's heavily using ai. Because the real question isn't how do we add AI to what we're doing? The real questions are way scarier, What do we need to completely dismantle so we can rebuild from scratch? Or how are our customers fundamentally changing, not just what they want, but who they're becoming? How is the entire business model shifting underneath us? Again, think taxis versus Uber. Where is the power moving to? Is it to the customers, the platforms, to someone we haven't even thought of yet? How can we deliver not just two x value, but 10 x value? Think Google versus Yellow Pages and, and this is crucial. What will never change? What's a human need that stays consistent no matter what. Technology comes along. Because if we don't ask these questions, the hard ones, the scary ones, we'll end up exactly like that. Bankrupt retail chain I met back in 97. Sitting in a shiny boardroom surrounding by achievements of the past, telling ourselves that we are relevant while the world reshapes itself around us. The illusion of progress is comfortable. Real progress, however, is terrifying, but it's the only kind that matters. So these are my thoughts on faster horses in 2025. I would really love to hear your thoughts about this. Are you seeing the illusion of progress in your industry? Find me on X. Drop me a line. I'd love to hear what you think. I want to thank you for listening, everyone, That's it for this episode. See you on the next one.