You Are Not Late

re: streaming, the value is the instant access to the content. how did you fill up your hard drive? rip DVDs? Pirate it? Totally absurd to say streaming legal content instantly is not compelling vs. the file server/warez approach.

Web based e-mail is obviously superior to setting up your own mail server. Zero-install, access anywhere. I have memories of configuring sendmail and ripping my hair out. You really think this was a superior way of dealing with something as fundamental as e-mail? Nowadays it "just works." In the interim we had ISP hosted mail servers which were always broken, misconfigured, going down, and eating our e-mail. I remember walking on eggshells helping people set up their ISP e-mail knowing that I was one checkbox away ("Leave a copy of e-mail on server") from making it so their entire e-mail history was a hard drive crash from being destroyed permanently.

And don't get me started on OSS source control. Github has transformed the way open source works. CVS (and non DVCSes in general) sucked. The online tools sucked. I still cringe when I get redirected to source forge for a download. A lot of amazing work got done but I'd never want to go back there.

I'm with you that wikipedia "the software" could have been created in the 1990s, but it would have been a barren wasteland without the larger access the web has now. In fact, I'd be shocked if there weren't a handful of attempts to bild an open internet based encyclopedia during that time, and now we have selection bias making us think wikipedia was the first. So what you see there is an example of something that, imho, couldn't exist without wider access to the web. Ie, it's an example of not just better tooling but Internet applications that became enabled by wider access, which is what you seem to have been arguing against actually existing.

I love this article.

But honestly, I think we make an important and incorrect assumption- we try to revolutionise by evolution.

Why put smartphones on your wrist or your head and call it a revolution? Why make an app that is a Tinder or a Wikipedia or a Google for something else and call it a revolution?

The real revolutions are going to be things that havent been thought of yet, in any manner. In the meanwhile, we have this hyper-accelerated evolution- lets focus on lowering the barriers for entry...

There is no such thing as "the low-hanging fruit".

The year is 1982. Rodney Mullen just managed to perform the world's first "Ollie" skateboarding trick, that can be count as somewhat the start of the modern day street skateboarding.

What now is the most junior skateboarding trick (with available equipment, training etc.) was not a low-hanging fruit back then. While looking back, you can easily learn the trick by imitating; but back then there was no-one to learn it from. You had to go trial-and-error a sh*tload of times before making the first trick.

Of course it looks sooo low-hanging fruit now. With current equipment and support. But you have to realise that the tools and methods came afterwards, to support the original invention. But looking the time back then, you had none of the aids. Just you, climbing to that tall tree to grab the apple and plant the seeds so everyone else could grab the fruits from smaller trees.