Matt Arderne on benn.substack

I don't think Dataform had general PMF to be clear, just a painful migration when they were acquired. They lacked broad community adoption of their open source core, and I think this was a tough narrative to compete directly with dbt here. Dataform retaining dbt compatibility would have been useful, but already then it lead to a poor UX and so they split. SQL transformation with a small team, Dataform was just easier and quicker. I wonder if the strong stigma attached to Dataform within dbt community maybe was part of the story, something along the lines of this bit. It felt tribal. https://groupby1.mattarderne.com/p/dataform-and-dbt#:~:text=preferences%20or%20opportunities.-,Sentiment,-generally%20went%20something Cascade, super interesting, definitely some hype within the fragmentation efforts indeed. Look forward to learning more in due course. One obvious thought on fragmentation, from a user perspective it seems generally positive (I don't need to buy X when Y is a better fit), but implied is smaller subsets of the original market, hoping that a new market is found.