That Randy Brown

Tent Poles and Table Stakes

Table stakes are the things that every entrant into a category must have. Every modern desktop LLM app has the ability to change the model in use. Every modern editor has history. All modern spreadsheets have formulas.

However, at one point, all of these features were tent poles: the thing that sets a product apart from its peers. Backup cameras, side curtain airbags, self-cleaning stoves. Over time, an industry is diluted as tent poles become table stakes: as competitors adopt the tent poles of each other to appeal to their markets. This increases the barrier for entry into a market as a standard feature, but introduces the opportunity to disrupt the market through feature pruning.

We see this in some of the resurgence of single purpose devices: remarkable has dumped all the overhead of the modern kindle as an android tablet and made it a designated feature that it is low tech and distraction free. Now every e-reader is rolling out color e-ink, a new tent pole turned table stake.

The place this might be most observable is that every app is eventually a task management app. And so many task management apps are adding more notion like features. Hey e-mail expanded to include a calendar. This is a common sense expansion: calendaring and email are table stakes, as most meeting invites come via email. Leaving it off and sequestering the user from standard e-mail interfaces narrowed the use case for this particular kind of e-mail.