The conventional wisdom on why everyone is suddenly watching foreign cinema again broke this year, and most of us are still operating on the old playbook.
What's changing
What's tricky is that the leading indicators are noisy. Vendor revenue is up, but so is churn. Talent moves both ways. Job postings list contradictory requirements. The strongest signal is what experienced practitioners do with their own time and money — and increasingly, they're betting on the opposite of last year's consensus.
Why it matters
What's tricky is that the leading indicators are noisy. Vendor revenue is up, but so is churn. Talent moves both ways. Job postings list contradictory requirements. The strongest signal is what experienced practitioners do with their own time and money — and increasingly, they're betting on the opposite of last year's consensus.
What to do about it
The shift began quietly. A handful of teams, working in parallel and mostly unaware of each other, arrived at similar conclusions: the old approach optimized for a constraint that no longer binds. Hardware got cheaper. Models got smaller. Distribution got more direct. Each individual change felt incremental — but together they reset the cost curve.
- Adopt early — the cost of waiting is higher than the cost of failing fast.
- Measure honestly — pick two metrics, ignore the rest for the first month.
- Talk to users — the gap between assumption and reality is wider than ever.
The takeaway
The biggest mistake will be treating this as a tooling question when it's actually a strategy question. Tools change. The underlying shift in customer expectations is what compounds.
