Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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I've been thinking a bunch about why it's the trivial projects (Altair, the WWW, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB) that change the world, and the change-the-world projects (Xanadu, WebTV, Chandler, WebVan) end up becoming trivial.

I think it's because of a quirk of human psychology. The value of a product to us, as a user, is about how well it fits into our daily lives. "Fits into" is the operative phrase: to get adopted, a product needs to be nearly invisible, and fit into what we're already doing so well that it's just a seamless augmentation of our own capabilities. Such products naturally seem trivial.

By contrast, we judge the importance of a project by a combination of a.) how difficult it was to do and b.) how many people it affects. Both of these are anticorrelated with how likely it is to fit into our lives. Difficult projects are usually complex; that complexity tends to spill over into the user interface and make it harder for us to make sense of how we would use the product. (Indeed, when moonshots like Google or Tesla succeed, it's usually because they manage to put a complex problem behind a really simple & familiar interface.) And aiming to please a large audience means handling a lot of corner cases, which again bloats the user interface and makes it harder for any one person to adopt it.

Once you've got lots of happy people adopting the product, they can serve as teachers and evangelists to bring a little more complexity to the wider world. But if you build something designed to change the world from the start, it tends to "bounce off" of the world, as it doesn't actually fit into the daily needs of any one person.

> I've been thinking a bunch about why it's the trivial projects (Altair, the WWW, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB) that change the world, and the change-the-world projects (Xanadu, WebTV, Chandler, WebVan) end up becoming trivial.

Selection bias, mostly. I mean, "change the world" projects also includes the likes of Apple Computer, Amazon, Edison's laboratory at Menlo Park and the World Health Organization. All of these have changed the world more than Reddit ever will. And whilst what Tim Berners Lee and Zuckerberg started off might have looked trivial, I'm pretty sure they were motivated by a belief that they could change the way people communicated, and not simply develop X for Y. scale. profit.

There's nothing wrong with doing the latter of course, and a business that revolutionises the world... of analysis of social media sentiments for digital marketers might well deliver far more radical improvements to the lives of its employees and early investors than companies with loftier and less well-defined aims. But the argument that this talent might have actually improved the world more by doing something as mundane and often-criticized as helping a fund pick stocks remains.

Apple Computer was also trivial when it started - it was a circuit board without a case, that hobbyists had to assemble itself, and needed an external TV to display any output.

Amazon had big ambitions, but they started selling books via Perl script. I remember when it first started attracting media attention in 1996, I wondered why the hell people could get so excited about selling books. If a similar startup launched today - say, call it book.ly - would you consider it a "change the world" company?

Edison's laboratory isn't a fair comparison: at the time it was established, Edison had already been inventing things for a decade. It would be like looking at Google in 2005 instead of 1995. (Google, along with Elon Musk's companies and Pixar, actually are the exception that the article talks about, where they seem crazily ambitious from the beginning.) Edison's first patent was for an electric vote recorder, which a.) sounds a lot less impressive and b.) didn't exactly change the world.

The WHO is an entirely different beast: it's an arm of an international organization, established under the umbrella of the United Nations. I would say it qualifies, though - it's under the "do something crazily ambitious" clause in Sam Altman's article. Indeed, even then it took 25 years to go from founding to the eradication of smallpox.

To find examples that actually contradict the point, you need to find companies that a.) appeared to outsiders, not just their founders, as crazily ambitious b.) at the time of their founding and c.) actually did change the world. There are relatively few of these; there are some, but it's a definite minority. Most of the time, if you think of an invention as having changed the world from the beginning, it's because your "beginning" was actually several years into its development, and your perception of its importance is colored by events & adoption that have already happened.

Frankly "world's biggest bookstore" shortly after launch sounds more like a potential world changing company today than much of what's coming out of Silicon Valley. And Bezos was bold enough to build it before many people had considered buying things online.

Sure, everything looks trivial to some people (bah! not another government-backed space launch vehicle manufacturer). But there's a big difference between companies that seem trivial to outsiders because those outsiders are sceptical about the founder's claims there's a mass market for the service, and companies that seem trivial because they're throwing VC money at incrementally improving existing platforms to capture a slice of a maturing market. Founders taking the Jobs/Bezos-type bet that things like consumer genetics and 3D printing are on the cusp of being ready for the masses evidently have world-changing aspirations even if many outsiders think the products will remain a toy (and even if hindsight proves them right). On the other hand it's already very well established there's a real and huge market for products which improve click through rates on ads, but you'll struggle to convince anyone that doesn't work in marketing that it's actually a world-changing mission, no matter how gushing the press release is and how close they are to success. I think the criticism directed at SV for focusing efforts on "trivial" problems tend to be directed mostly at companies with the latter type of ambition than the former.

I feel like products that boast to be revolutionary also drive away users because it increases what they expect of a product. Products that are designed to be 'game changers' from the start often try to solve problems or offer people alternatives in areas where people don't like to make the compromises one typically has to make with things that are still in beta or just starting out. The trivial products come with lower expectations, which I think also lowers the threshold to give them a try.

This sounds somewhat like the "worse is better" philosophy - optimizing for virality/simplicity over quality and completeness.

Reminds of Atwood's law: http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/

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