Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

jasonlbaptiste.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–67 of 67 posts

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#61

Post by callmeed »

portman wrote: post #59
callmeed wrote: post #53

"Transactions I would argue they still are–especially on the mobile web. I was talking about this with a co-worker ... unless you want to give Apple 30% of an in-app purchase, it seems there's no easy way to sell an item or subscription on your phone. People don't want to enter their billing information–especially on a 3" screen. Until we have some sort of secure/universal/mobile "ONE-CLICK" purchase solution that do…

Are you aware of PayPal's Micropayments feature? $0.05 plus 5%, meaning a $0.99 purchase only costs 9 cents (they round down). https://micropayments.paypal-labs.com/ Note: this is the third time I've posted this link on HN in about 5 months, but each time people have thanked me for it so at risk of looking like a shill, here we go again...

Yes, I'm aware of it ... but it's not the solution I'm seeking.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#62

Post by bl4k »

I don't believe this theory of 'build what had previously not been possible' because it is not true and does not match evidence.

An example is the readiness of markets. Many successful web 2.0 companies were re-implementations of old dot-com ideas, with the technology being the same (bar frameworks that minimized development time) but with a more ready user market and refined implementations.

For example: XDrive - Dropbox, Friendster, theGlobe.com etc. - Facebook, Yahoo bookmarks - delicious, boo.com - etsy, etc., webvan - amazon delivery, etc. etc.

Further, many of the technologies cited are old (GPS is almost 40 years old). It is economies of scale that resulting from market acceptance that make these technologies more viable. Most software products do not require bleeding edge technology, which is often a curse (ie. using HTML5 today when 80% of browsers do not support it).

If you think about what made YouTube, Facebook et al successful, it wasn't some magic new technology, it was the right implementation and market acceptance.

This bit has been done to death, but what is different today is:

* It is faster to develop apps because developer time is more efficient and scalable because of tools, but there is nothing in RoR, Django etc. that couldn't have been done 5 years ago with PHP (and I mean that in the end result, not how it is done).

* Broadband penetration (especially globally)

* Browser penetration (IE5 introduced xmlhttprequest in 98, but it took 7 years to reach a decent use base for Ajax apps to be viable)

If you went by the advice here and intoduced a bleeding-edge Ajax app that was bandwidth heave would have failed in 2000 (and they did, we would use xmlhttprequest for intranets only).

The risk with this advice is entrepreneurs betting on new over better and becoming complacent in believing that what they have as better and 'previously not possible' should win.

(edit: so I guess you could say 'build what had previously not gained market but would today because of tech penetration')

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#63

Post by chris123 »

bl4k wrote: post #62

I don't believe this theory of 'build what had previously not been possible' because it is not true and does not match evidence. An example is the readiness of markets. Many successful web 2.0 companies were re-implementations of old dot-com ideas, with the technology being the same (bar frameworks that minimized development time) but with a more ready user market and refined implementations. For example: XDrive - Dr…

I think all he meant you don't have to invent something brand new, but you said you should take advantage of the new tools, technologies, social graphs, etc. that were not previously available. It sounds obvious, and maybe it is, but it's a good reminder and he put together a great list with great examples. Hat tip / thank you to Jason.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#64

Post by jakevoytko »

freakwit wrote: post #58
jakevoytko wrote: post #24

To accomplish this, it helps to keep a list of important problems that haven't been solved yet. As you hear about incremental improvements, it may suddenly be within reach, when popular knowledge says otherwise. Online video was obviously going to be a killer app: one Victoria's Secret Live fashion show brought the Internet to its knees several years before Youtube existed. There just wasn't a way to do it well befor…

What sort of problems are people thinking of? SSDs have been a big speed improvement - have they enabled new developments?

In mobile robotics you can record data on the move without worrying about damaging the disk or enduring sudden massive write latencies. So you get more interesting datasets using SSDs than you could with traditional disks.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#65

Post by zwetan »

bl4k wrote: post #62

I don't believe this theory of 'build what had previously not been possible' because it is not true and does not match evidence. An example is the readiness of markets. Many successful web 2.0 companies were re-implementations of old dot-com ideas, with the technology being the same (bar frameworks that minimized development time) but with a more ready user market and refined implementations. For example: XDrive - Dr…

> If you think about what made YouTube, Facebook et alsuccessful, > it wasn't some magic new technology, > it was the right implementation and market acceptance.

I would have put that as the right implementation at the right time

many implementations will fail simply because of being too much ahead of time

the "right time" imho is not only about market acceptance or market penetration it's also about "when people are ready to accept it".

Before google decided to use xmlhttprequest for gmail, nobody would want to use it because it was considered "IE only", but once google used it, it gave xmlhttprequest a certain credibility and then suddenly everyone started to use it and then the word "Ajax" was created.

In another context, take smartphone publishing their location in foursquare or whatever, it's not only because they have the technology to do it (GPS), it's also related to social acceptance, after people got used to display their personnal infos on facebook, myspace, etc. then it is just a little jump to accept to display their geolocation.

I do believe in "build what had previously not been possible" but it's not only because of technology or market penetration, there is also a big "social acceptance at the right time" parameter.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#66

Post by jasonlbaptiste »

bl4k wrote: post #62

I don't believe this theory of 'build what had previously not been possible' because it is not true and does not match evidence. An example is the readiness of markets. Many successful web 2.0 companies were re-implementations of old dot-com ideas, with the technology being the same (bar frameworks that minimized development time) but with a more ready user market and refined implementations. For example: XDrive - Dr…

You could certainly build things that were possible before, but I'd rather suggest entrepreneurs go towards that, which wasn't. And if you do build something that was possible before, ie- Dropbox, then I suggest you use the building blocks to build an iteration that wasn't possible before. Dropbox was started as a small project by Drew and eventually a YC funded company with a small 25k in capital. It wouldn't have been possible to do Dropbox before AWS,etc. without spending a ton of up front Capex in hardware you may or may not use down the road.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#67

Post by waleedka »

jakevoytko wrote: post #24

To accomplish this, it helps to keep a list of important problems that haven't been solved yet. As you hear about incremental improvements, it may suddenly be within reach, when popular knowledge says otherwise. Online video was obviously going to be a killer app: one Victoria's Secret Live fashion show brought the Internet to its knees several years before Youtube existed. There just wasn't a way to do it well befor…

Good point. Maybe jasonlbaptiste's next article would be a list BIG problems still waiting for good solutions. Here are a few I can think of:

- Email 2.0 (Wave was a good experiment but we need more)

- Online Dating (still broken)

- Online job search (could be improved a lot)

- Search 2.0: A Knowledge Engine that understands the question and finds you the answer.

Post reply on HN