Owning Inevitable Developer Workflows
Diving deeper into
Lenny Bogdonoff, co-founder and CTO of Milk Video, on the past, present and future of Javascript
they're building the tooling in the places where there are things that are inevitable.
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The core insight is that Vercel wins by wrapping itself around steps developers cannot skip. Every team has to run code locally, share work in progress, review changes, and push to production. By putting Next.js and preview workflows inside the same system, Vercel turns routine developer chores into product surface area, which makes a basic hosting product harder to swap out even when rivals are cheaper.
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This is different from selling only final hosting. The sticky part starts earlier, when a developer is still editing files on a laptop, using hot reload, environment variables, preview links, and team review tools. That expands Vercel from a deployment vendor into part of the daily coding loop.
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The closest comparison is Netlify. Netlify also built deploy previews and browser based review tools, which shows this workflow is valuable. The difference here is tighter control of the framework itself. Owning Next.js lets Vercel add product features at the framework layer, not just at the hosting layer.
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That also explains why build speed matters so much. Developers feel slow tooling every few minutes, not once a month. Faster compilers, preview environments, rollbacks, and collaboration features save tiny chunks of time over and over, which is why teams often tolerate premium pricing for what looks like commodity infrastructure.
The next step is more of the software creation process moving into the same loop, from local development to preview to production and back again. The companies that control inevitable workflow steps will keep pulling value upward from raw cloud hosting into higher margin developer tooling and collaboration products.