Hacker News Reader

The Internet. It just took 10-15 years longer than everyone thought it would.

Mobile phones & PDAs as well - they were super-hyped right around 1992, it just took 15 years after that before someone produced a device that was actually exciting.

Actually, it's generally been a pretty good business strategy to take whatever was hyped up 10-15 years ago but was then written off as unworkable, and then reimagine it with modern technology. Think of Javascript apps (DHTML 1997 -> Angular 2012), streaming video (RealAudio 1996 -> YouTube 2006), e-commerce (everybody 1995 -> everybody 2012), webmail (HotMail 1997 -> GMail 2004), GUI interface builders (NeXTStep 1992 -> XCode 2007), mobile phones (Newton & General Magic 1992 -> iPhone & Android 2007/09), lithium-ion batteries (first prototypes late-80s -> widespread cellphone/laptop use mid-00s), etc.

It doesn't do much good for the investors of those early waves of companies, though.

These are different than what the OP was talking about. He's basically asking about stealth products like segway etc...

All your examples were ones where the initial hype around the technology/idea just wasn't ready yet, it wasn't one company playing coy and then coming out with some groundbreaking thing like the iPod/iPhone was.

Why do people think the iPhone was groundbreaking?

It was evolutionary, it was very, very well polished (something apple are good at) and it was advertised massively. But it wasn't streets ahead of the competition.

When the first iphone came out, it was the only mainstream device to ditch the physical keyboard, allowing for a very large (for the time) touchscreen, while keeping the device thinner and lighter than high-end competitors. This screen, along with pinch to zoom, allowed desktop websites (which were basically all websites at the time) to realistically be used on a mobile device. You certainly could browse websites on other devices, but you wouldn't want to, given a choice. The original iphone is what really started mobile browsing.

I remember the very first presentation, when Steve Jobs used pinch to zoom and a gesture to rotate an image. My mind was literally blown, and I was using a WindowsCE smartphone for a few years at that point. Also the browser looked like something that didn't suck.

It was something above well-polished, it was that moment when you look at something and just think "why didn't anyone else think of this already? it's so simple!"

Mobile browsing had been around for quite a while, and I had used Opera Mobile on various phones for some time. PDAs, when they existed as separate devices, tended to have larger screens than phones, and allowed reasonable browsing too.

The iPhone was a great product, I'm not denying it, but I wonder if the perception that it was revolutionary comes from the state of the US market at the time - generally thought to have been years behind Europe and Asia.

I browsed web in phones before iPhone, the experience was awful. Though there is some truth in your saying that the US market was much behind Japan and Korea at that point. (Europe and rest of Asia was definitely not significantly ahead.)

I used a pocket pc in 2003sh. It was garbage, but the form factor was very close to an iPhone. Treos were damn good and we used them to surf the web, iPhone was just much better.

iPhone was incremental, just like the bb was incremental

"But it wasn't streets ahead of the competition."

I think this is a highly controversial opinion, especially with hindsight. Consumer products are never just about the hardware specs, but about how the entire ecosystem around the product functions..

Two competing platforms (Nokia and Windows phone) tanked and the only viable current competitor (Android) came to market afterwards and driving marketshare by imitating the specific innovations the device had (plus with a certain degree of openness).

I'm not saying it is all about the hardware. I don't think the iPhone experience was revolutionary either.

Nokia tanked due to very, very poor management and branding. Internal competition between engineering units and tens of handsets with overlapping features made the brand slowly sink into the mire.

When thinking about the iPhone, remember there was no app store for over a year, and other platforms had had one since 05 or before.

Apple got a lot of stuff right, they released a great product. But it wasn't the huge leap forward people like to present and I often wonder if the perception that it was such a leap forward comes from the state of the US market at the time, not the world market (particularly Europe).

It was the first touch-first mobile OS built from the ground up to accommodate gestures. At the time, the limited touch screen phones available had an awkward stylus. Then they packed in GPS with Google Maps, accelerometer, double-sided camera, iTunes access, unlimited data, visual voicemail, etc. And Apple's app store was the first one that didn't suck. The few that had app stores did not have robust SDKs with tooling for building apps, you had to use Java VM and go through an arduous submission process to get your app on any other phone. Apple streamlined it, made it simple, and completely dominated the industry for a reason. The iPhone was clearly revolutionary, and a 10X improvement over any other phone on the market to that point.

The creator of Android doesn't agree with you https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...

>Why do people think the iPhone was groundbreaking?

Because every phone that came after it (and currently) follows it's form factor.

That's hardly surprising, given its form factor is "it's a screen".

It wasn't the first phone to market with that concept, and tablet PCs had been around for a while. They were a total failure, but they were there...

"Those who can tell the future of technology, we call Futurists. Those who can tell when a technology will reach the market? We call them Billionaires."

The Internet had immediate and obvious applications, it just took time for those to become fully realized. It was also a massive effort involving entire industries, not one dinky little company hacking away on some idea in obscurity.

There were companies making internet killers, don't kid yourself, and they're all dead. Prodigy. Compuserve. People don't even know what they are.

Likewise the mobile phone had immediate and tangible benefits, but it took a while for the devices to get small enough and cost-effective enough for everyone to be able to afford them. They had immediate appeal. This was also a push done by an entire industry.

It's extremely rare that a singular company ever succeeds on this scale.

>The true breakthroughs are built by those quietly plugging away, scared to death that if they take a breath to talk about it their competitors lurking in the shadows will pull ahead.

With the exception of Apple, I don't think this is really true. ARPAnet, Transistors, Cellular networks etc... were all discussed and probed and iterated on in the defense/research community then in industry.

> The first $100M or so I understand; they thought they were getting in on something new and great.

Abovitz is a serial entrepreneur with a previous $1B exit. That alone counts for a shitload, if not everything. If you can show someone even a rudimentary display that gives accommodation and can build a competent team then that gets the hype cycle started. All due credit where deserved, Abovitz knows how to raise money.

Having worked in the robot-assisted surgery field, I can tell you that Mako (Abovitz's previous "success") was similarly hyped and was acquired for an enormous sum despite the facts that (1) surgeons hate using it and (2) patient outcomes are no better [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24574012]

I should have clarified that I didn't mean general tech, but specific tech products that are hyped.

You're right about the serial entrepreneur aspect. But we're still talking about staggering sums.

>With the exception of Apple, I don't think this is really true.

It's true of Microsoft, Google, Amazon and even airbnb because while the latter eventually got vc, they didn't have that same hype. They all spent years doing unglamorous work before becoming a name like Magic Leap is today.

It's really rare to go quickly from bleeding-edge research paper to consumer product.

Google Search was one. Lytro another.

Magic Leap's demos were ridiculous because they required monumental leaps in various areas - computer vision, holographic imaging, CPU/GPU energy efficiency (computationally).

I don't see how this is related to business history. Having some sort of basic understanding of scientific and technological progress, sure. But an MBA?

They had a good, fake demo for vaporware. That's all.

This is a good point, it reminds me of the F-35. Anything over hyped and given too much time and money will always be underwhelming.

Great technologies grow organically out of need and real life demands. Greatness isn't created purely out of conference rooms and imagination.

Magic Leap should have set the bar lower to get something out of the door sooner and depended less on hype of possibilities but excitement for what they actually created. Then they don't have to hit it out of the park the first time or nothing. Which is basically what they've set up expectations for.

There is no "low bar". You either do AR, or you don't. There is no in-between. Just look at Hololens to realize why you can't do this half-way.

Google Glass is probably a good example of halfway failures. They did well on implementation of some sort of screen in front of the eye among other things, but in the end, they stopped short of AR in favor of just a screen sitting in front of the eyeball.

To your point: it'd be impossible to achieve AR without some major breakthroughs in eye-tracking _or_ general 3D image rendering in front of the eyes. This is what hololens had to achieve before AR made sense, and just to be able to ship it in spite of the hardware constraints, they were stuck with a small viewport in Gen 1.

The only real compromise with implementing AR is FOV coverage. If you're going to cover the entire FOV, you should either get creative (rendering low-res outside what hits the fovea of the eye, which would be possible only with eye-tracking) or use a small viewport.

Hololens did it right. It seems (judging from the hardware) that Magic Leap is trying to avoid compromises of any sort, so they're probably doing it wrong.

> You either do AR, or you don't.

Looks like Magic Leap are opting not to do it.

I remember being in school playing with Google Earth. Hype back then was a bit different but I recall everyone who laid eyes on it was blown away.

Another great google product that I think is actually under hyped is Google translate. I was in Kiev and ordered off a menu by looking st it through my smartphone. Sitting at a table with 6 engineers and everyone was floored. If you haven't tried it I highly recommend it.

Google translate has been seriously under the radar lately. I tried it recently and was pretty blown away. Using it almost daily now.

Google Translate has been improved immensely just in the past six months or so, through neural networking and machine learning [0]. It's become MUCH better at translating full sentences and coherent text - in some cases it's hard to differentiate from a competent human translation. They have made great improvements to both speech recognition [1] and text-to-speech[2] as well. It feels so damn sci-fi to just pull up a phone, talk into it and have it repeat what you said in japanese or spanish.

Siri is still mostly useful as a kitchen timer though.

[0] https://blog.google/products/translate/found-translation-mor...

[1] https://research.google.com/pubs/SpeechProcessing.html

[2] http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12860866/google-deepmind-wa...

Didn't Word Lens do it before Google Translate? I mean I was demo-ing that shit in 2010 (Google probably does it much better now).

Google bought Word Lens and then integrated the tech into Translate.

Recently Handy sent me a cleaning lady who couldn't speak English at all. I communicated with her entirely through Google Translate. We even negotiated an additional hour of work.

The iPhone.

(aka Jesus Phone, aka "they're not just going to walk in") was probably one of the biggest hyped things in recent history, and it absolutely did live up to it's claims.

Where was Apple hyping the iPhone before it came out? There were rumors for sure, but from what I remember, Apple was secretly plugging away during this time. (Please correct me if I am wrong)

I guess I was referring to the 6 months between unveiling and release in 2007 and the several months of speculation beforehand in 2006. It was pretty frothy, and I was amazed at what they did produce.

Edit: does hype have to be first-party? Apple is king of the rumors-as-marketing hype machine.

This situation seems very different to me. Apple didn't publicly raise a billion and a half dollars of funding on the promise of the phone during the time you mention, and it's been nearly 3 years since the hype started around the Google investments with almost nothing to show. Apple had already made the iPod and was well established. Smartphones already existed, just not as well executed. Magic Leap is promising a vast advancement of the state of the art in multiple fields.

I'd say the big difference is that Apple weren't "inventing" the whole thing. It would have been perfectly possible for Nokia to have built something similar, but they didn't for what seemed to them solid commercial reasons.

Apple's big contribution was smashing into a broken market that didn't serve its consumers.

Better than Google's never-delivers-on-its-hype machine. E.g. Google Fiber, Google Loon, Google Self-driving car....

> But the next $1B? Did they never read a business history book during their MBA program?

It’s clear that a bunch of senior Google people believe that we will all own an augmented reality device in the near future, and they don't want to cede that market to Microsoft (having killed Glass).

I believe that, too. However the intermediary step will be audio not video (similar to the movie 'her') because of the less obtrusive user interface.

The closest in recent times is Elon Musk claiming he would create a highly-desirable electric vehicle AND a rocket that can land itself. But I wouldn't say he was hyping it, he always said there was a large chance of failure.

This is key.

Because Musk always says "There's a very good chance might not happen" very talented people perk up because what they hear is a guy dreaming with pragmatism. When very smart people see that, they want to help make it happen.

I always liked the newspaper ad that Shackleton posted for his expedition to the South Pole:

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success

Supposedly, 5,000 men applied after reading the ad.

- Note: historians can't find the ad, it might be a myth, but I still like it

I don't disagree. I enjoy reading business history as well. But there is definitely a large number of people who either believe in or are open giving a chance to a new "West Coast business" approach.

I think "West Coast business" originally comes from a football term, but idea that a new silicon valley-style business approach has overtaken the old "M7 MBA" thinking has evidence. Like journalism is experiencing now...things may have changed.

Don't most businesses fail regardless of how much money they raise? What is a true breakthrough anyway? Has it gotten harder to keep secrets from competitors in the shadows? Can you an ambitious company raise money and hire the best people still without a PR-hype-machine going full speed ahead? What does success even mean these days, are founders and VCs trying to IPO big businesses or sell expensive secondary shares and cash out a bit?

I agree, most of these business will fail. While I don't participate in the hype, I can understand the thinking behind pushing for a super-funded startup strategy that attracts talent, strategic investors and that can hang with competitors since I.P./courts cannot be relied on.

My only hope is that they saw something amazing. Really though, 1bn before shipping is insane.

SDN?

There was a lot of hype for electric light which was absolutely justified.