There are junior DS positions or data analyst positions available with a bachelor’s. Though most AI practitioners have a graduate degree. A phD is certainly helpful but if Your goal is industry, building a track record of training models also does the job.

Plus outside of academia the software engineering part is of significant importance and something you can, if you invest the time, really set yourself apart by learning proper software engineering!

But still the luxury handbag will be better than the non-luxury one. Whereas the luxury software will be worse, because the non-luxury brand can afford way more manpower to make it great. On the other hand, a luxury software company cannot afford the ad spend to increase brand perception.

The essence of the software business is the vanishing marginal cost. That is what makes the business model so great.

A luxury software essentially cuts itself out of the single most value generating market mechanism in the industry.

I don’t say luxury software is impossible. But I say that the market dynamics of the software industry are such, that the dominating players and vast majority of successful businesses (wrt. to revenue, size, cultural influence) will be mass market or specifically tailored b2b products. Not luxury goods.

I would grant you the argument that superman is somewhat of a luxury app.

However, i think these will stay fringe and exceptions and not become a big thing. Like the 1k diamond iPhone app that did nothing.

No.

I don’t think luxury software will or even can be a thing.

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Software has vanishing marginal costs of replication.

Therefore, mass adoption of a consumer app will make way more revenue than high price low volume apps (b2b is a different story because of the ticket sizes).

But this means, mass market companies can afford better designers and better engineers and ultimately create the better product. That is why there will be no luxury software. If you pay more for a product, you want a better product. Otherwise the flex does not work and just makes you look dumb.

Additionally, most of the time, you also interact with software either alone (no one to flex to) or the other users are part of the value (a luxury instagram with no one to like your post does not make sense)

RIZE is pretty standard consumer saas pricing.

Superhuman only works because there is a subset of e-mail power users with requirements (i.e. shortcuts) that the mass market explicitly does not want (they want a clickable ui). So they found a niche with a higher willingness to pay. With the hefty pricetag, you could argue it’s luxury software, but my guess is, it’s mostly sales people and enterprise customers. And then we talk a b2b not a luxury use case. And it’s in a similar ballpark as Figma, Adobe and other b2b saas.

In the end the market dynamics of software (such as in media) inhibit the emergence of luxury software.

The only “luxury” apps I can see are such where low adoption of select people are part of the value prop. E.g. Elite Dating Apps. But here, The community rather than the software is the product.