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As is often repeated around the tech industry, "Early = wrong". Knowing that mobile became a huge hit in 2010 doesn't really help the folks writing apps for NewtonScript in 1992 or Palm in 2000. WebTV was a specific Microsoft product (that was gonna be huge, it was the next information superhighway!) - it was actually a set-top box more like GoogleTV or AppleTV - and Microsoft benefitted not a bit from YouTube or Netflix's success. If you got the "casual games" part right but missed the "mobile" part, you ended up like Slide, Newgrounds, or Kongregate, all of which are in decline now, usually bought for 2x invested capital or so.

> Knowing that mobile became a huge hit in 2010 doesn't really help the folks writing apps for NewtonScript in 1992 or Palm in 2000.

Which begs the question "were predictions too early, or were early executions insufficient". There are a million examples of first movers who didn't execute. Off the top of my head Yahoo, Blackberry, and IBM OS/2 were first to market for generational techs and then lost.

> Which begs the question "were predictions too early, or were early executions insufficient".

Its not A or B; its A, in part because of failure to correctly anticipate B. Predicting market success is, inherently, a prediction of market participants successful execution.

To succeed you often have to get in early, which means that barrier to entry will be low and competition will be extreme. Plenty of these things didn't fail because they idea failed, but because they got beaten by another company, or a simpler or more advanced technology. I think market success is a higher bar than concept or technology success. Which probably means it is more relevant for discussions (more qualified discussion are better).

I said this in another thread. We know that self-driving cars are gong to be a thing in the future. That doesn't necessarily mean that the effort a company like Google makes today is going to be that valuable. It might be that when full autonomy is ready for mass implementation, we already had cars running around with (much cheaper) sensors for years. Since things like highway autonomy and active safety systems are lower hanging fruit. On the other hand if they gather enough patents and full autonomy explodes in 10 years, they have a good position. There's all this complexity yet most of HN is like "Google is the self-driving company".

Newsgrounds and Kongregate was "web casual games platforms" not "casual games companies" like King or Zynga. Notch (Minecraft) worked as a programmer at King between 2005 and 2009. The app store didn't exist until mid 2008. Minecraft is in many ways a casual game.

WebTV is in that case not a good "prediction". You have to look at what the premise is and if the product fits the premise. Cheap and easy access to the web is failing because of it's hard to build an ecosystem. Most people don't want to buy, say a chromebook, if something else with the full ecosystem is available at a similar price point.

From my perspective, semantic web (if we are talking about the same things) failed not because of mobile, but for a variety of other reasons. When semantic web was taking off, the web was very heterogeneous, and web authors could not be expected to write proper tags. In addition, it received little support from mainstream search engines like Google, and for good reason; while the intention of semantic information was to help indexing and other agglutinative tasks, by being invisible to the user, a malicious web page might misrepresent the nature of their content.

My lasting (but maybe wrong) impression of the semantic web was that it was basically about interconnecting things. I think when focus shifted to mobile, where closed app store with isolated apps were the norm, that idea became less practical. But I can't say if it was because of mobile or just that the companies "grew up" and this was then reflected in not adopting the semantic web and how mobile was designed.

There is a part of the semantic web being subsumed by AIs. Viv, Alexa, and Google's and Apple's offering will be interesting as people start creating apps for those. (And as you said, timing and how widespread things get is fuzzy).

Another part of semantic web that had not taken off had to do with www itself. For example, in thinking about blockchain and ipfs, it's possible to create a fully decentralized data store. But to do it well, we'd need to incorporate the semantic web ... And possibly machine learning. I don't think anyone has yet figured out how to do a fully decentralized AI yet.

Interesting, my probably incorrect assumptions are that the semantic web was largely 2000s era hype that didn't really take off. What are Vivs, Google and Apples semantic web offerings? I guess you are referring to the knowledge graph API from Google? Also what's an ipfs?

> What are Vivs, Google and Apples semantic web offerings?

Both Google Now and GMail/Inbox -- as well as Knowledge Graph in Google Search -- incorporate substantial functionality building on semantic web concepts.

Some of them are built on Schema.org markup, which is essentially a modern, multiparty defined vocabulary semantic web markup vocabulary.

I don't think Viv is offering a semantic web offering. They are using it. Viv is a generation ahead of the current chat bot AIs, and able to deconstruct a query or a request and then construct actions. Those actions span across multiple APIs and ontologies.

I'm not entirely sure how, but the Viv ontologies grows and change as Viv gets used. What would be interesting is to see how the third-party developer interfaces for Viv will look like, and whether incorporating semantic markup in data sources would make it easier to get your offering on the Viv platform. Assuming AI/MLs takes off as the next big thing (which as was asserted, it's not a certainty, but seems likely), I can see the technologies behind semantic web getting resuscitated as people try to get their offerings onto these AI platforms.

IPFS is a completely decentralized store that combines a lot of older ideas in a way that hasn't been tried before. All content is content-addressable (like git), decentralized (like bittorrent), with nodes automatically discovering each other (dht), and a networking strategy that works with NATs. You can use it to publish content, and that content would be pinned or stored by the users who care about the content.

One of the ways you can use IPFS is a kind of decentralized, immutable, unstructured datastore. So if you were writing an app on that, how do you make sure the data is sufficiently structured for your app? You might need to declare schemas, as well as describing a graph of how each piece of data are related to each other. Once you start trying to use IPFS as a kind of decentralized graph database, someone will probably reuse the ideas from semantic web or reinvent it.

+1 for mentioning Buckminster Fuller. I have a copy of Spaceship Earth on the bookshelf, a great thinker. Thanks for the detailed response, just in time for some weekend reading : )

What's a bookshelf ? ;)

Its where you use old programming books to put your monitor on so its the right height for you.

One more: Buckminster Fuller had this concept of ephemeralization. He talked about how technologies get smaller and smaller until they are invisible. For example, water and sewage pipes are ephemeralized. They are ubiquitous (at least in first-world countries) _because_ they are invisible. I think that is what happened with semantic web. It didn't vaporize so much as ephemeralized.

The AI/ML platform is interesting because I think a lot of it is shifting over to voice-based, rather then web-based (or mobile/tablet-based) interface. A voice-based interface is more invisible than a touch or mouse-based interface.

Come to think of it, adding in the idea of ephemeralization might be a good way of getting a better estimate of timing for a technology. In such a case, voice-interface (and the AIs that power them) would probably be closer to being the next big thing than VR (based upon ephemeralization).

William Gibson usually talk about how when things are new they are called with a prefix, like "electro", "cyber", "i" or "wireless". Then when it becomes commonplace it usually just sounds silly. We usually don't say "mobile phone" (unless talking about mobile vs. web/desktop) anymore, but we say things like smart-tv.

The semantic web came silently. Google bought Freebase and has been incorporating that into search. Microformats still live. It just wasn't the big bang it was hyped as.

You're absolutely right. "The next big thing" is a term marketing folks and journalists like to bat around because it (over) simplifies difficult concepts.

The general trends have been miniturisation and ubiquitous connectivity, and they haven't just appeared in one big thing, but in every area of life.

Shrink and grow rich ;)

WebTV was just a thin client device you attached to a TV to access the web and email. It wasn't a video service. So it's probably closer to the iOS category, a device for accessing the internet that's cheaper/easier than a PC.

Could you say more about "WebTV -> YouTube, Netflix"? There are two things I could imagine WebTV meaning here (TVs used for Internet access; broadcast TV including more interactive elements) and both are basically the opposite of YouTube and Netflix.

I'd also question the "VR->Warcraft" thing. the 90s notion of VR was about something much more like the current hype for VR, with head-mounted displays and natural human movement in imaginary spaces. Even in the 90s we had what I think of as the predecessors to WarCraft and MineCraft, which were 3D games like Doom.

I also think you can't sweep timing under the rug like that. The next-big-thing phenomenon has timing as literally the first word. And that's important when talking about technology as a business. PDAs were always a niche business; it took integrating them with the cellphone to make the leap to ubiquity. But none of the PDAs made it into the promised land; Palm even had PDA+Cellphone models, but by then they were too old, too tired, too confused to seize the moment, so Apple did.

nsxwolf pointed out that WebTv was something I've never heard about [0]. I guess we didn't get web on the tv so much as tv on the web. I'm guessing the original purpose was to give more people access to the web and that as such is fairly solved by phones. I have a hard time being upset over "they promised us WebTv, but all we got were internet access everywhere".

I think VR was both in the 90s. In large part VR was an interface to getting access to another world. A lot of it stemmed from things like neuromancer for example which isn't really natural world. It wasn't necessarily how realistic a flight simulator is. HTC Vive is quite interesting hese days with the room concept.

It's hard to argue perception of the past though. I'm just saying that plenty of things that are commonplace today, like kids playing (as in the traditional sense of the word) together online, would be science fiction in the 90s.

Regards to timing, I don't think it is unexpected that technology takes a few, or even many, years to live up to expectations. A smartphone is way more like a PDA than it is an early cellphone.

In the end I think the most important part is just having more qualified discussions about these things. We know self-driving cars are going to be a thing and internet connected devices and digital currency, in which capacity it can, should and will be is the interesting part.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV

> WebTV -> YouTube, Netflix.

WebTV (The product that was later acquired by MS and became MSN TV, and was discontinued in 2013) is basically a forerunner of web-connected smart TV STBs.

It is distinct from the newer "Web TV" (web-delivered TV-style content) like Netflix and Youtube, though WebTV's successors are a common vehicle for Web TV.

>VR -> Warcraft, EVE Online, Minecraft

How are any of these VR? The first warcraft was released in 1994, Eve in the early 2000s and Minecraft in the 2010s.

None of these use VR. Decent VR was a pipe dream in the 90s but today it will most likely become a reality. Not sure if the public will adopt it en masse.

In early 2000s, there was massive hype over Second Life. While that never went mainstream, you could see it as the ancestor of today's WoW and Minecraft. I think that's what OP was talking about.

I would point out that World of Warcraft was announced in 2001 and released in 2004. Second Life was released in 2003. I imagine that it's possible Second Life influenced the development of WoW, but I would hardly call it an ancestor.

Second Life wasn't the ancestor, so much as a dead-end descendant of a common ancestor, Ultima Online, and Meridian 59 before it. Ultima Online itself was developed to sate a demand for graphical versions of MUDs, which can be said to be the ancestor to the MMORPG genre.

I'd say that Second Life is more of a descendant of MUSH/MOO/MUX than of Ultima Online/Meridian 59.

i second the UO association because of the concept of virtual real estate. In UO housing was a large aspect, regulated with an ownership system, which made the entire world nuanced and relevant. Beyond second-life, I have not seen that level of world-building in any game. Even Minecraft on a server with block area ownership is not the same, as you typically just end up with an endless landscape of art pieces, rather than a functional user-created environment.

Before UO came out, MUSHes had exactly that (with object/room ownership and @quota to constrain what you can build at any given point).

Nothing is ever new, of course. =)

That's pretty much what EVE Online is. Most of the galaxy belongs to player-owned corporate alliances, who build infrastructure such as space stations and outposts.

As far as I remember the "virtual" hype of the 90s was more about the concept of virtual worlds, cyberspace and having experiences online. I think that part has become true in things like WoW and Minecraft. VR as a technology is still not mainstream, but has always existed in form of simulators and other niche products. I don't think anyone should have expected that to come sooner, because the technology just wasn't ready (cheap) yet. It still isn't in some ways. I goes back to my earlier point, people imagine things one way, but we get something else that is practical at the time. Doesn't mean it didn't happen though.

i am a bit ambiguous about these cycles, its a bit like death/rebirth. Each time i get to work with a new industry: before 2002 i was doing windows stuff , After that it was Linux,networking/security. Now since 2012 its all about storage. the stupid thing is that finding a new job is harder once you are getting a bit older...

Did you mean ambivalent?