Live data from Hacker News

The End of the Beginning

stratechery.com

51–60 of 119 posts

Re: The End of the Beginning

#51
post #31

Don't agree, comparing histories is not a reliable way to predict the future, I think we'll see the growth of governance level disruption, a pushback that will encourage home grown solutions for countries that are not necessarily aligned with US interests. That field is wide open and growing!

Policy driven disruption is the only option I see to break the cycle. Let's see.

Re: The End of the Beginning

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems it is getting harder and harder to disrupt the Big Four Microsoft, IBM, Oracle... What is the other one? Or, right, wrong decade. (My point is, it completely not obvious if it is getting harder to disrupt the incumbents.)

> Microsoft, IBM, Oracle... What is the other one? Cisco, of course.

It was actually Oracle, Sun, Cisco, and EMC who were the four "horsemen of the Internet" in the run up the dot-com bubble.

Re: The End of the Beginning

#53

I've been thinking along the same line, albeit on a more personal take as a software engineer. Basically, starting around 15 years ago, there's the proliferation of bootcamps teaching fullstack development, because software startups were the new hot thing, and they desperately need generalist engineers that were capable of spinning up web app quickly. Rails was the hot thing those days because of this as well. Hence…

Isn't the perception of a saturated market persistent though? I mean, there were many social media apps when Facebook started. Twitter was created when microblogging had already become a trend.

Anecdotally, it seems like the rate of disruption in this space has been steadily slowing down.

Re: The End of the Beginning

#54

I've been thinking along the same line, albeit on a more personal take as a software engineer. Basically, starting around 15 years ago, there's the proliferation of bootcamps teaching fullstack development, because software startups were the new hot thing, and they desperately need generalist engineers that were capable of spinning up web app quickly. Rails was the hot thing those days because of this as well. Hence…

Software is still eating the world, and there will be plenty to eat for a long time. Cars (the foremost example in the OP) had basically eaten the world by the 1950s (sometimes even in a fairly literal sense).

Re: The End of the Beginning

#55
> What is notable is that the current environment appears to be the logical endpoint of all of these changes: from batch-processing to continuous computing, from a terminal in a different room to a phone in your pocket, from a tape drive to data centers all over the globe. In this view the personal computer/on-premises server era was simply a stepping stone between two ends of a clearly defined range.

Sure, that's what happened.

But what jumps out for me is that, at both ends of that range, users are relying on remote stuff for processing and data storage. Whether it's mainframe terminals or smartphones, you're still using basically a dumb terminal.

In the middle, there were personal computers. As in under our control. That's often not the case now. People's accounts get nuked, and they lose years of work. And there's typically no recourse.

As I see it, the next step is P2P.

Re: The End of the Beginning

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the perception of a saturated market persistent though? I mean, there were many social media apps when Facebook started. Twitter was created when microblogging had already become a trend.

Anecdotally, it seems like the rate of disruption in this space has been steadily slowing down.

Even the most pointed to example and seemingly saturated space, social media, had three major players emerge last decade: Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.

Re: The End of the Beginning

#57

I've been thinking along the same line, albeit on a more personal take as a software engineer. Basically, starting around 15 years ago, there's the proliferation of bootcamps teaching fullstack development, because software startups were the new hot thing, and they desperately need generalist engineers that were capable of spinning up web app quickly. Rails was the hot thing those days because of this as well. Hence…

"Fullstack" development is just a tiny slice of software. There's an entire economy to be automated, there are endless inefficient processes and massive opportunities there.

Re: The End of the Beginning

#58
I disagree. A long period of evolution starts when a revolution before that managed to find a more or less working solution. However at this point, there are at least two big problems that haven't been solved properly yet, that get worse every day, and where a revolution would be more probable than evolution - social networks and payments.

I believe at least one more revolution would still be possible before we have a long period of evolution. It will be a shift from centralization to de-centralization (one more time), actually to federation. De-centralized federated systems might be able to get social networking and payments to the level where it finally works well and only needs to be gradually improved.

Re: The End of the Beginning

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until I have something resembling Iron Man's Jarvis with at least a subvocal interface, I think there's still a long way to go for "continuous" computing. I currently still have to pull out a discrete device and remove myself from other interactions to deal with it. If I'm not on that device all the time, then I don't have continuous computing. Maybe continuously available computing is more accurate?

Right -- today you need to remember to charge your phone, you don't take it everywhere (and don't have signal everywhere, especially internationally), and you need to take it out of your pocket to use it, and type into it with your thumbs (though voice "assistants" are here, and some people get use out of them.) The end-goal is being able to talk to anyone at any time, remember anything you've seen before, and know t…

Everything you describe are very minor tweaks to what already exists today.

The bottom line is everyone does have their phone charged and with them always, is probably out of their pocket most of the time anyway, and can get the answer to pretty much any question you can phrase that someone has already answered. The voice assistants will continue to improve, but some people actually prefer thumb-typing for various reasons.

And the "improvements" you suggest probably bring even more problems from privacy, security, and mental health issues than any plausible benefits they might provide.

Re: The End of the Beginning

#60
> there may not be a significant paradigm shift on the horizon, nor the associated generational change that goes with it.

That's possible, but I see things that lead to me think that we're not there.

Primarily, there are a number of rather serious problems with the cloud, some of which are inherent to the paradigm and likely can't be resolved -- we'll just have to live with them.

When a paradigm has such problems, the possibility always exists that a new way of doing things can come about that sidesteps those problems.

Post reply on HN