Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

Raku (formerly Perl 6) basically sits alone as the successor to the slower-and-more-expressive throne. It's a great language to study for the gee-whiz-they-thought-of-everything factor.

But, nobody is paying attention to it. Some of that is because of the Perl 6 baggage, but just as much is probably because this past decade was so heavily entrenched in proliferation of the web-cloud-mobile paradigm that new scripting systems weren't part of the hype cycle. If it didn't get the backing of the FAANGs, it didn't register.

I can imagine a day coming where scripting shines again, though. It might actually be closer than we think. There is always a need for glue code, and glue code benefits from being a kitchen sink of built-in functionality.

> Facebook will be the Google of the decade. > Google will be the Microsoft of the decade. > Microsoft will be the IBM of the decade.

The "decade" timeline doesn't quite fit but to be honest this wasn't a bad prediction [1].

> Facebook will be the Google of the decade.

This feels very accurate, down to the people. There's plenty of ex-Googlers at Facebook, including Sheryl Sandberg, who essentially built Facebook from "a really cool site" to the profitable ad business it is now.

Google bought YouTube in 2006, and now it's a huge economy of content creators. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, and it's now a growing economy of influencers. There's plenty of differences of course, but in the ad-tech space it's Google then Facebook, in Machine Learning it's Google and Facebook. What big companies are releasing cool open source software, adopted by millions of developers? Google and Facebook.

Miss-information, hate speech, political controversy and issues with publishers? Facebook and Google/YouTube. In terms of data-tracking only Google is comparable to Facebook— or rather only Facebook is comparable to Google? Virtually complete dominance of a key-part of the web? Google and Facebook. Number of users? I could argue only Android and Facebook are at point where they have to provide free internet to people to gain more users. Diversification into hardware? First Google, then Facebook.

The list goes on. Facebook is (perhaps too ruthlessly, and "breaking too many things") largely another "Google" in many ways. Not sure if this is what the prediction was getting at, but it's interesting to think about.

> Google will be the Microsoft of the decade.

Right now it feels like this is happening. Right now, Google is ubiquitous and feels unbeatable like Microsoft. It also has (1) platform dominance in web and OS and key services, (2) an incredibly diverse set of products and (3) anti-competitive behavior stemming from this dominance. It also has (4) a thick layer of middle-management fighting for relevance leading to (5) lots of product churn, worsened by (6) lack of focus due a "vision" vacuum in upper-management.

I'd suspect the next few years without Page or Brin will be interesting. It'll also be interesting to see if Google 1. Can pull of hardware (Pixel was a good start, but the latest iteration has a lot of reviewers disappointed) 2. Can focus (Android, Chrome OS or Fuchsia? Will they commit to a messaging service?) and 3. Can deliver new products that stick.

> Microsoft will be the IBM of the decade.

Up until Satya Nadella took over in 2014 and his changes started materializing later in the decade this largely sounded like it was the case— old stagnant company, held mostly by slow-to-change enterprise customers, and little in the way of new products.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026088

are you saying you have a child with a cell phone or tablet that has location services explicitly turned off ?

i dunno, seems negligent to me

This is why I like to stick around HN and just read. The minds here seem to be much more brilliant compared to other parts of the web. That dude nailed it!

Now just to predict what will be the big thing in 2030 so I can get rich :)