Comment by Detrus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Detrus | Hacker News Reader

Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out.

I would say Twitter and Facebook in particular are still are incremental and trivial as billion dollar companies and always will be. The web is a dumbed down version of older hypertext systems and hasn't shaken that legacy in 25 years.

The real problem with the pace of innovation is these things weren't trivial to build, that's why the best we can do is incrementalism. And that comes from the foundation systems we use. When something near the bottom of a technology stack/pyramid offloads complexity to the top, it becomes a nightmare to get anything done.

For example, we don't have a natural language command line for regular/stupid users. Instead we have point and grunt GUIs. That means apps have to be monolithic. Apps can't work seamlessly with one another even if the underlying tech allows it.

And from that small bit of complexity we get billion dollar walled gardens.

More detailed read http://pchiusano.github.io/2013-05-22/future-of-software.htm...

Instead of a simple standard interface for users to access various services we have http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f0... which kills discoverability and creates a constant drag on people to learn a million UIs. And then we hope to fix all that with another layer of AI http://whoo.ps/2015/02/23/futures-of-text

You can fool yourself about worse is better while making a few bucks. You can wall yourself off from the naysayers. But the real impact on the economy and humanity from eBay, AirBB and FaceTwitter is low.

Twitter gives disadvantaged minorities a voice. That's a real impact on humanity.

Please give us some examples of companies you feel have "real impact on the economy and humanity"...?

Edit: Also, successful companies that started out with those ambitions?

To single one out, the Full Belly Project is a great example. Their Universal Nut Sheller has had a real, measurable impact on economies.

In general terms, several industries have had a real, measurable impact on economies. The scooter, the diesel truck, the steel hulled boat, the washing machine, the cell phone... There are many successful companies in these industries that have a real impact on humanity and make a profit too.

I find it astonishing that you couldn't think of examples of businesses that have had a bigger impact on humanity than Twitter and Facebook.

> I find it astonishing that you couldn't think of examples of businesses that have had a bigger impact on humanity than Twitter and Facebook.

I never said I couldn't think of businesses with more (current) impact than Twitter and Facebook! I think my work history amply illustrates that (Google[x], Google Life Sciences, etc).

I was simply saying: A lot of really great, impactful businesses started off with more-modest beginnings; chiding existing upstarts for not being sufficiently ambitious borders on hubris.

Real impact is "low" and the market will reflect that after the hype settles. There wasn't much to pour money into at the start of this tech bubble/cycle so FaceTwitter got a lot more.

Every other business that doesn't aim to be some small boutique has growth and impact in the back of their minds, or got the idea after a taste of success.

And by far the biggest impact in computing has been from NLS-Mother of All Demos and Xerox PARC Smalltalk, who were aiming for exactly that. Measured in the trillions. Each individual startup's hyped up billion dollar share of this pie is small. As it should be, since they handle narrow subsets of functionality and can't even work seamlessly with each other. And most users can't deal with all the different UIs.

Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" had a huge impact on the world, but was an epic failure for his business. Xerox never capitalized on his innovation... so by that measure (since I asked you to name companies), it was a failure. ;)

Yes financial reward and power wasn't properly distributed in these cases. But economic impact is not just about their individual success. It's economic.

>But the real impact on the economy and humanity from eBay, AirBB and FaceTwitter is low.

Yay! This post. A mathy-engineering type condescendingly putting down services with a billion users while the world communicates and shares things with each other on FaceTwitter (I see what you did there, the services are the same functionally, so why differentiate them? very clever). While they're sitting around being too good for these services for the masses, the masses are being entertained, meeting new people, and staying in touch with old acquaintances, and enjoying themselves. Also not thinking a lick of the engineer who is too good to use their services.

>The web is a dumbed down version of older hypertext systems and hasn't shaken that legacy in 25 years.... You can fool yourself about worse is better while making a few bucks.

Yep. Worse is better because all of these things are just iterations on the thing you originally saw, which is obviously the pinnacle of the web. It's like people who move to New York City and expect the city to stay exactly the way it was when they first became emotionally attached to it. Or people who join reddit and complain about it going to shit because it's different from when they joined it. The web wasn't in some ideal state that you happened to come across and get in with while it was good. The one constant of the internet and the web is how it evolves and changes.

I was never good at mathy things, decent at abstract art.

The masses were already entertained by AOL chatrooms and ICQ. A lot of older people I see stay in touch with email, and they got each other's addresses by talking on the phone. And they use it exactly like facebook newsfeed, forwarding silly news stories to each other and not being able to format out the endless forwarding chain. They don't think a lick of the innovative engineering and billions of dollars behind facebook, because their batch of friends just forwards emails. I've heard some complaints about the terrible formatting, people asking to be taken off the lists, people not knowing how to do it, but it mostly works. Facebook confuses them too. Some only use Skype.

What is facebook when you boil it down to its real functionality?

Address book with photos

Event system for the address book

Mail forwarding between people in the address book

Filters for forwarded messages

Filters for people in the address book

Media storage and filters on who can view it

But mostly a UI that enables a larger percentage of casual computer users to use more of these features than they could in email. Takes the friction out of the forwarding messages use case. Sharing photos and the address book are in one place and searchable.

A single UI for a bunch of features that used to be a mess of separate UIs http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f0...

And there are your entertained masses and billions of dollars. But what was it worth when half of those features were stuck in email?

The GUI and the way we organize programs is why we shoveled a bunch of these features from one place to another and made a big fuss about it when an unknown proportion of users started using more features than they did in email.

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