51–60 of 209 posts
healthcare?
Possibly the absolute last market sector where you want people thinking of their products as toys.
This did not hold up well, imo. Not sure how to count it but by some lists this is stuff like: Tencent, Alibaba, Amazon, Netflix, Priceline, Baidu, Salesforce.com, JD.com. Others would include Uber/Lyft, Airbnb, GitHub, ... There are only a few that would qualify that I can think of - Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp. If folks here have other examples or thoughts on why this does or doesn't hold true would love to h…
I can see curren-gen VR and AR games leading to next-gen "real AR" glasses with an impact on far more than just gaming.
I think most participants in the Internet circa 1996 and personal computers in the early 1980s would understand this idea. The Internet was being widely written off as a toy that many couldn't ever imagine having practical applications. Case in point, this widely-cited piece from 1998: > The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connec…
By this test, is Lego the next big thing?
Big entrenched players are unable to see the next big thing, because they see the world through the glasses of their successful business. Microsoft for example almost missed the internet, and suddenly realized it in 1995. I believe Bill Gates was quoted as saying it was just a fad. The funny thing is that more than a decade earlier (about 1980) I heard the same thing about "personal computers" or "microcomputers". Just a fad. A toy. Never will compete with IBM's "real" computers, etc.
Similarly, these new fangled "automobile" thingies will never become popular. They are noisy. Smelly. Unreliable. Difficult to start. You can even break your arm if it kicks back while you are cranking it. And worst of all (gasp!) they frighten the horses! That's why these automobile thingies are just rich kid's toys. A fad.
I guess they couldn't see that all of those imperfections I listed could be fixed.
Back in the 1990s I saw this interesting tv program. Sorry, can't remember. It was about personal computers. The person being interviewed said the entrenched players NEVER see the next big thing coming. So they hire someone smart who will see it coming, and then tell them when its coming. And then when they are told this is the NEXT BIG THING! They never believe it.
Speaking of Microsoft almost missing the internet, they did entirely miss the new generation of smartphones starting with the iPhone. Ballmer laughed at the iPhone. They woke up to the new reality after it was too late. Sorry iPhone and Android already dominated. Smart phones sold in unit volumes that dwarfed PC unit volumes. Win Phone 7, followed by an incompatible Win Phone 8 didn't stand a chance -- even with nice Nokia hardware.
I have a question for those who were there at the very beginning of the internet. I heard that many were skeptical about both personal computers and the internet.. did it feel the same as it does right now with crypto-currency/quantum-computing? I wasn't there, but on my side, it feels like people were able to use internet right from the beginning, whereas there's a bigger leap to using crypto/quantum. Is it just tha…
If you ever watch "The Graduate" and the guy gives the college grad advice to go into "plastics" because it's the next big thing, that's computers in the 80's and the Internet in the 90's.
People were quick to latch on to the web because it facilitated things they really wanted to do like keep in touch with friends and buy things easily. Cryptocurrency doesn't do that for most of the population. PC's were a hobbyist thing at home and more akin to cryptocurrency, but at the same time they were completely taking over how business operated.
The web had a similar impact on small businesses too. Having a web presence exposed small companies to a much larger customer base than they could have ever hoped for before.
Cryptocurrency doesn't really solve real-world problems like this. Most people are perfectly fine using traditional currency and wouldn't see any benefit to replacing that with Bitcoin, et al.
Edit: I think the most recent change that you might have been around for was the introduction of the iPhone and the smart phones that followed. Huge paradigm shift for the general population.
This makes me think of Fortnite. What if Fortnite, and the impact it's going to have on us, is yet but a tiny baby?
You must not have school-aged kids, Fortnite is already dead.
I have a question for those who were there at the very beginning of the internet. I heard that many were skeptical about both personal computers and the internet.. did it feel the same as it does right now with crypto-currency/quantum-computing? I wasn't there, but on my side, it feels like people were able to use internet right from the beginning, whereas there's a bigger leap to using crypto/quantum. Is it just tha…
The immediate benefits of the Internet were obvious, and much more interesting than any theoretical "take over the world" growth story. People were willing to tackle slow connections, bad UIs and device configuration hell so that they could get chatting on IRC or posting on Usenet or downloading files from weird/shady FTP servers.
With cryptocurrency, there's nothing new or interesting you can actually do, no meaningful human connections to be made. It's just speculating on a made-up growth story, like penny stocks you can trade 24/7 — but we already had penny stocks and boiler room scams.
I think most participants in the Internet circa 1996 and personal computers in the early 1980s would understand this idea. The Internet was being widely written off as a toy that many couldn't ever imagine having practical applications. Case in point, this widely-cited piece from 1998: > The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connec…
And humans are very impatient and are driven toward immediate gratification.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By this test, is Lego the next big thing?
The real test, I think, is something that has genuinely useful applications to anyone with a little bit of vision. Big entrenched players are unable to see the next big thing, because they see the world through the glasses of their successful business. Microsoft for example almost missed the internet, and suddenly realized it in 1995. I believe Bill Gates was quoted as saying it was just a fad. The funny thing is tha…
They almost succeeded, but Google would've canned their game eventually. Believe it or not, "free stuff" is popular.
This did not hold up well, imo. Not sure how to count it but by some lists this is stuff like: Tencent, Alibaba, Amazon, Netflix, Priceline, Baidu, Salesforce.com, JD.com. Others would include Uber/Lyft, Airbnb, GitHub, ... There are only a few that would qualify that I can think of - Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp. If folks here have other examples or thoughts on why this does or doesn't hold true would love to h…
If you looked at PCs from 1993-2003 you would've had a similar view. PCs from 1983-1993 underwent dramatic progress: you went from 16-color TV outputs, 64K of RAM, 8-bit CPUs, floppies, command-line interfaces, and BASIC to 24-bit color, 3D computer graphics, GUIs, 16MB of RAM, 200+ MB hard disks, 32-bit CPUs, IDEs, desktop publishing, CD-ROMs, modems and Internet access, even speech recognition and text-to-speech on some Apple machines. From 1993-2003, you had incremental progress: Microsoft won, Windows 3.1 became Win95 and then eventually Win2k, CPUs got faster, RAM and disks expanded, broadband happened, but what we used the computer for didn't change much, except for the advent of the Internet. The Internet itself was supposed to revolutionize computing, but the dot-com bust happened in 2001 and in 2003 it was still pretty much a toy. And other much-hyped developments like WebTV, VR, voice recognition, and AI had fallen flat.
There are plenty of toys that are still in Irruption now. Cryptocurrency was supposed to change the world; the bubble burst in 2018, but maybe we'll see it come back in 2020 with DeFi the way the Internet did in 2005 with social media. Drones are literal toys right now. So is VR & AR. There's been a lot of progress in computing for kids with things like Scratch, RoBlox, or Minecraft.
I have a question for those who were there at the very beginning of the internet. I heard that many were skeptical about both personal computers and the internet.. did it feel the same as it does right now with crypto-currency/quantum-computing? I wasn't there, but on my side, it feels like people were able to use internet right from the beginning, whereas there's a bigger leap to using crypto/quantum. Is it just tha…
Given that, blockchain may be in a similar state to the early-middle Internet. It's out there, you can play with it, it's neat and seems useful even if for most people that practical purpose is elusive. Maybe someone has yet to create the Netscape that turns it into a must-have tech, but it might be happening as we speak.
(Edit: TCP/IP came out in 1983, and HTTP in 1990. In 1995, the year of the Netscape IPO and when everyone "knew" the web was a big deal, there were 40 million Internet users. Now there are about 32 million Bitcoin wallets. I think some of the other answers are remembering things a bit later in time, or more colored by hindsight.)
On the other hand, quantum is much farther out. The percentage of people who have used a quantum computer at all is minuscule. When it does become useful, it may be too expensive to see mass adoption for decades.