PCs, Smartphones, the Web, JavaScript... All things that helped me making a good living.
The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
111–120 of 209 posts
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes me wonder, though. I wonder if you went back to the very earliest days of the WWW, did everyone see it as a toy? Or were there already people (those developing it, perhaps) who saw that it had awesome non-toy potential? I suspect people brand new tech as "toys" when they're not, and I bet there's also developers that take their toys and call them products :) Maybe the solution is to completely discard the…
> I wonder if you went back to the very earliest days of the WWW, did everyone see it as a toy? The WWW that was created to share scientific papers? Or you mean the GP's Internet that was created to organize the US troops on the event of a nuclear strike? I guess so, there was plenty of people aware they were not toys. Most of those people did use them as toys most of the times, like everybody else at the time, but t…
Just as a side note: the Internet was not actually created to organize US troops in the event of a nuclear strike. The Internet, the one initially birthed by ARPA, initially had academic and civilian aims. That said, some of the early research on networking was developed to aid the military in case of nuclear war. In particular, Paul Baran invented package switching explicitly to help the US air force maintain its defense radar network in case of war.
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#113I 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…
When the first web browser came out, for me (and, I've heard, very many others) it was a "where were you the day of..?" moment. I literally remember the afternoon X-Mosaic came out. Computer lab, 1993, a group of grad students huddled around a SPARCStation, I walked over and tried out this new program. No, I didn't see the huge eventual potential that day (the World Wide Web would remain an ad-free space for a few more years), but it was a definitely a "today everything changed" moment.
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#114I 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…
I think your last sentence is perhaps the most important - timing the "Toys to Big Thing" transition is really hard and leaves a lot of dead companies in its wake. For example, at some point in the future, VR and AR will probably be in this category, but who knows how long it will actually take (basically-modern VR has been around since the 80s!) or what will cause the shift. Meanwhile, VR has left a decades-long trail of dead plans/businesses and AR seems to be doing the same.
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#115I 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…
I think your last sentence is perhaps the most important - timing the "Toys to Big Thing" transition is really hard and leaves a lot of dead companies in its wake. For example, at some point in the future, VR and AR will probably be in this category, but who knows how long it will actually take (basically-modern VR has been around since the 80s!) or what will cause the shift. Meanwhile, VR has left a decades-long tra…
ehhhhh I would disagree with your statement that "basically-modern VR has been around since the 80s." It really seems like this phase of VR really began with the release of the Oculus Rift DK1. Sure there had been earlier prototypes floating around, but they weren't taken seriously.
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Exchanging data for value will be normal and young people will ask how it ever could work without that. How is this different from using a credit card to e.g. purchase a streaming movie? Is it just more seamless? Or does the fact that there isn't a centralized bank behind the transaction somehow significant for the consumer or business? (I'm really just trying to understand this btw) > Kids will aks if it's true th…
In short credit cards do not move value at all. You authorize payment instructions. Which in turn leads to balances being adjusted. It's basically a debt transaction instead of a value transaction. It has several advantages like that banks can adjust balances for a specific time with many parties and then calculate the effective difference (a lot will cancel each other out) and only settle the real differences. There…
Why do I care whether it's a "debt transaction" or a "value transaction?"
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#117If you're hung up on the word "toy," another way of phrasing this is the next big thing will look like just a hobby to most people. Looking forward, smart homes and 3D printing are 2 industries that fall in this bucket. Both feel like toys to the majority of the market right now, but have the potential to completely change how we live. 3D printing - low-cost manufacturing has completely revolutionized what's possible…
I was working on software in the 3D printing space back in 2012, and I too thought it was going to be something big that looked like a toy.
However, I got out once I realized that speed of prints mattered a lot of consumers. And the current methods of consumer 3D printers were FDM (fused deposition modeling) and Stereolithography, which both had asymptotic limitation on how fast you can get a print to go. For FDM, there's a head you need to shunt back and forth. For Sterolithography, the consumer printers like Form 1 had a mechanical step between each layer.
Unlike chips with Moore's law or LEDs with Haitz's law, 3D printers aren't going to get much faster. That's when I got out.
So in order to get an order of magnitude faster print, someone needed to invent a completely different method--a step function.
So I think it's not just that it's a hobby, but you might need another criteria, like there's at least a plausible incremental path to improvement along the parameter that the market would care about.
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#118I'm trying to brainstorm what I think is a "toy" in today's tech market, and I can't think of much. Tech pundits who have seen 30 years of crazy endeavors are taking everything overly seriously. Companies have the resolve to invest billions in "jokes" (like Facebook Portal) stubbornly refusing to recognize a sunk-cost fallacy. Instagram is the most recent example of a revolutionary toy - when everyone thought social…
Just look at what's polarizing, what you might dismiss without looking deep into it. Cryptocurrencies is a good candidate. So is VR and AR.
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#119I 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…
I think your last sentence is perhaps the most important - timing the "Toys to Big Thing" transition is really hard and leaves a lot of dead companies in its wake. For example, at some point in the future, VR and AR will probably be in this category, but who knows how long it will actually take (basically-modern VR has been around since the 80s!) or what will cause the shift. Meanwhile, VR has left a decades-long tra…
Augmented reality is a great example. Everyone knows that it will become a "Big Thing" in the future. Like why would smartphones be the final form factor of personal computing? Of course there will be something that will dethrone it.
But despite every big company throwing a couple billions at the problem for the last few years (Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of oculus, Google's $500 million investment into Magic Leap, Apple's acquisition of Metaio/ARkit, Microsoft Hololens), all we have are literal toys!
So now you can't talk about AR as a serious subject anymore. People all dismiss it, saying we are still too early. I imagine it's like that for every "toy to big thing" transition.
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#120I'm trying to brainstorm what I think is a "toy" in today's tech market, and I can't think of much. Tech pundits who have seen 30 years of crazy endeavors are taking everything overly seriously. Companies have the resolve to invest billions in "jokes" (like Facebook Portal) stubbornly refusing to recognize a sunk-cost fallacy. Instagram is the most recent example of a revolutionary toy - when everyone thought social…
Some examples of 'toys' in today's market - AR/VR, Drones, Another factor is that investment in tech is dramatically higher today that it was 20 years ago (partly due to success that early investors had) and people are willing to invest in anything that looks like a 'toy' in the off chance it pays off.
Are drones still considered 'toys'? At least in photography, they have long ceased to be toys. Given that you have big companies working on them (like amazon for deliveries), I'm wondering if they are still in the 'toy' phase.
VR is. The incremental changes are not yet enough to make them practical for non-gaming use (and even gaming, they are amazing, but cumbersome). AR is firmly still in the toy camp.