Bitcoin?
The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
131–140 of 209 posts
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your first link is blocked for me by the website owner. The second in turn links to https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/climate-change-will-push-ca... . When they say "cars are an expensive toy for the rich" they're saying figuratively that cars aren't reliable nor efficient. I don't think anyone would disagree that [important, useful] new technologies tend to get cheaper and more efficient over time. It's really not cl…
https://web.archive.org/web/20190722171109/https://www.leade... Internet Archive mirror, should be accessible.
For clarity, that's a mirror of the first link I posted.
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#133I 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…
Bitcoin fits all of your criteria perfectly
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#134I 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…
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…
https://youtu.be/8tCC9yxUIdw
A wonderful 1 minute snippet of David Bowie explaining how huge of a deal it’s going to be to a skeptical interviewer in the 90s
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#135I 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?
Literally, no. Conceptually, maybe.
Lego represents the construction of objects from catalogs of standard components. That’s in comparison to carving unique, one off toys from raw wood.
Professional fabrication has followed in the footsteps of LEGO (and Lincoln Logs, Erector Set). If you use SketchUp to design a building you’ll notice it’s encouraged to use standard building components that can be picked from a library. Lots of those components can then be picked up at Home Depot. Ikea furniture kits are also similar to Lego (or at least the broader category of toy).
LEGO’s Mindstorms GUI programming model is very forward looking. LabVIEW and Simulink are picking up on those concepts & professional engineers are definitely using them.
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#136If 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, th…
PDAs fit this IMO. We had newtons, palm pilots (Clie), Windows CE, devices (iPaq, Axim, ...), all of them were for geeks/hobbyists only until iPhone. Anyone carrying one was considered a geek out of the norm. Now you couldn't pry a smartphone from a non-geek's hands.
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#137This 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…
Would you call Bitcoin a "toy"? If so, it really is just saying that it is likely to be something you are initially dismissive of.
World of Warcraft Gold & similar in-game currencies are toys.
Bitcoin is not a toy, but follows in the footsteps of those toys (in addition to traditional currencies).
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
which I'm not sure is really classified as a smart home thing. This is amusing to me, I think as soon as something becomes somewhat common it will no longer be classified as "smart home". Sort of like how the definition of AI is a moving target.
It's definitely a smart device. But to me a smart home has a central system that can monitor a variety of inputs and, in response, control a set of things to accomplish some goal. We have a robot vacuum and robot mopper. Me going over and pressing the robot vacuum button, then once its done, placing the robot mopper in position and pressing the start button, is using smart devices but isn't a smart home. If I can tel…
A vacuum is really easy to use; what's a real pain is cleaning the vacuum cleaner. When are they going to automate that?
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 L…
Remember the PC revolution. Altair was a toy. Atari 2600 was a toy. TRS-80, Sinclair Spectrum, Apple II — all toys. Amiga was almost not a toy, and Aople Macintosh and IBM PC were mostly not toys anymore. From there on, businesses started to use massive amounts of PCs, thanks to killer apps like word processors and spreadsheets. Prices fell, home users took note, and a real explosion began. It took mere 20 years, say…
In that 20 years the hardware and software exponentially grew in capacity and decreased greatly in cost. Computers turned into something you’d want in your pocket once they could be unobtrusive enough to be tolerable with you all day.
On that note, who knows what would AR require in order to take off. It probably needs to be something you can get 80% of the killer features without wearing glasses. It also needs to support whatever frames glass wearers want to wear. It might require actual visual implants as I don’t think there’s a way to turn a contact lens into a display.
Re: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.leaderherald.com/news/local-news/2019/07/when-au... https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/toys-rich
Your first link is blocked for me by the website owner. The second in turn links to https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/climate-change-will-push-ca... . When they say "cars are an expensive toy for the rich" they're saying figuratively that cars aren't reliable nor efficient. I don't think anyone would disagree that [important, useful] new technologies tend to get cheaper and more efficient over time. It's really not cl…
"The early users appeared to use cars for transportation, which the second link doesn't contradict, so not literal toys."
I think when people say they were toys, they mean that in the same sense that a Spyker or Ariel Atom are "toys" today.