91–100 of 119 posts
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Even the most pointed to example and seemingly saturated space, social media, had three major players emerge last decade: Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.
Viber 2010, Pinterest 2010, Ask.fm 2010, Twitch 2011, WeChat 2011, Medium.com 2012, Slack 2013, Telegram 2013, Musical.ly 2014, Discord 2015, are all in related/overlapping space and have tens of millions of users.
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…
Right but this is because startups are largely a financial vehicle to transfer value created by employees to investors and founders. If startups actually gave employees a real stake in their business, the equity math would make much more sense. Its a cultural issue, but also, the set of people working at startups for worthless equity is mostly disjoint with the set that can get hired at Google/FB. Its almost a differ…
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…
Right but this is because startups are largely a financial vehicle to transfer value created by employees to investors and founders. If startups actually gave employees a real stake in their business, the equity math would make much more sense. Its a cultural issue, but also, the set of people working at startups for worthless equity is mostly disjoint with the set that can get hired at Google/FB. Its almost a differ…
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I mean, if you even look at popular sci-fi, nobody exactly predicted the internet as it is today. It wasn't until someone coined the "information superhighway" that gears started turning. Even then, the earliest commercial websites were basically just digital brochures and catalogs. It wasn't until SaaS, search and social took off that we grasped what the specific use cases were that were going to be the dominant mon…
The concept of an information superhighway dates to at least 1964: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway#Earli...
I'm not exactly sure where I fall on this. Ben is a really smart guy (way smarter than me), but I feel like this could be a classic case of hindsight. Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon". So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult…
Was it really that hard to predict the Internet? SF authors picked up on it almost immediately.
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Even the most pointed to example and seemingly saturated space, social media, had three major players emerge last decade: Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.
Viber 2010, Pinterest 2010, Ask.fm 2010, Twitch 2011, WeChat 2011, Medium.com 2012, Slack 2013, Telegram 2013, Musical.ly 2014, Discord 2015, are all in related/overlapping space and have tens of millions of users.
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Isn’t that kind of his conclusion too though? It matters in as much as we’re less likely to see new general purpose public clouds come into play, but he didn’t seem to predict there was no more room for change in the industry, just that were unlikely to see those incumbents toppled from certain foundational positions in the ecosystem.
Much of Ben's writing recently has been on the topic of regulation and anti-trust, specifically in relation to tech companies. If I had to summarize his thesis, I'd say it's something along the lines of: "Previous antitrust regulation prioritized price. Tech allows for better products by nature of aggregation and network effects, and to promote competition, we need a new prioritization in our regulation". So, I see t…
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The concept of an information superhighway dates to at least 1964: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway#Earli...
It looks like those terms from the 60s and 70s referred to "superhighway" in regards to communication, but didn't prefix it with "information". And whether someone incidentally used the word or not is sort of irrelevant. It started to become popular as a means of visualizing the possibilities of the internet in the late 80s and 90s, and that's when I think the first people started to imagine what this might become in…
The Brotherton reference in particular interests me -- masers and light-masers (as lasers were initially called) were pretty brand-spanking new, and were themselves the original "solution in search of a problem". I've since come to realise that any time you can create either a channel or medium with a very high level of uniformity and the capacity to be modulated in some way, as well as to be either transmitted/received (channel) or written/read (medium), you've got the fundamental prerequisites for an informational system based on either signal transmission (for channels) or storage (for media).
Which Brotherton beat me to the punch by at least 55 years, if I'm doing my maths correctly.
I've made a quick search for the book -- it's not on LibGen (though Internet Archive has a copy for lending, unfortunately the reading experience there is ... poor), and no library within reasonable bounds seems to have a copy. Looks like it might be interesting reading however.
Point being: Brotherton (or a source of his) had the awareness to make that connection, and to see the potential as comparable to the other contemporary revolution in network technology, the ground-transit superhighway. That strikes me as a significant insight.
Whether or not he was aware of simultaneous developments in other areas such as packet switching (also 1964, see: https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html) would be very interesting to know.
Not much information on him, but Manfred Brotherton retired from Bell Labs in 1964, and died in 1981:
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/25/obituaries/manfred-brothe...
Similarly, I bet that our great-grandchildren will look upon the Internet, e-commerce, and mobile phones the same way we look upon railroads, paddle steamers, and power looms. Great inventions for their time, and drivers of huge fortunes, but also quaint anachronisms that have long since been replaced by better alternatives.
Notice that the article focuses almost entirely on I/O and the physical location of computation. This is a pretty good sign that we're still in the infrastructure phase of the information revolution. When we get to the deployment phase, the focus will be on applications, and our definition of an industry focuses on what you can do with the technology (like fly or drive) rather than how the technology works. In between there's usually an epochal war that remakes the structure of society itself using the new technologies.
FWIW, there was a similar "quiet period" between the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, from 1840-1870s. It was very similar: the primary markets of the original industrial revolution (textiles, railroads, steamboats) matured, and new markets like telegraphs were not big enough to sustain significant economic growth. But economic growth picked up dramatically once a.) the tools of the industrial revolution could be applied to speed up science itself and b.) the social consequences of the industrial revolution remade individual states into much larger nation-states, which created larger markets. That's when we got steel, petroleum, electrification, automobiles, airplanes, radio, and so on.
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> What useless shit are you going to buy with 'life changing' money exactly that a software developer's salary won't allow? I still have the childish dream of wanting to change the world. Specifically, I want to be involved in certain kinds of political activism that will likely piss off a number of people, and I want to have enough money that I can support my family without needing to back off if my income source is…
Yeah, I'm personally uninterested in spending money. But I could quite easily find things to do with money in the 10-100M range. First being starting companies without being beholden to investors that are monomaniacally focused on short-term cash extraction. Then investing in entrepreneurs who are up to good things in the world. And then supporting people who do useful things that don't pay well.
But in developing and emerging economies you can make a huge impact.