Comment by alaskamiller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alaskamiller | Hacker News Reader

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1. A New Search Engine

Turns out it's not about new search engines but rather how to capture search intent. Amazon did that to beat Google.

2. Replace Email

This will be done by notifications and direct messaging. Kids these days don't bother with email.

3. Replace Universities

Turns out this is just upscaling. Most of the job training stuff is dropping out of the lower orbit of a university and being swallowed up by the new in faux DeVry tech boot camps. But want to be an AI expert? Want to be a doctor? You still need to put in time in academia.

4. Internet drama

They all mostly caught up. Still can't beat Netflix though.

5. The Next Steve Jobs

Conan O'Brien, a fellow Harvard alum, said it much better. In the pursuit of being someone else you end up being yourself. Just be yourself.

6. Bring Back Moore's Law

This is happening in GPUs.

7. Ongoing Diagnosis

This is happening.

3-5 years is about a cycle that turns high tech to low tech. Most of the stuff talked about in 2012 are now low tech. Things like mobile app development or tablets or 4k TVs. Twas a good feeling back then, now it's all AI and MR and rapid fabrication.

> 2. Replace Email

> This will be done by notifications and direct messaging. Kids these days don't bother with email.

Pg is not talking about personal emails for messaging. Personal messaging is mostly "read, reply, and forget", and you are right that this is now better served by instant messaging protocols (modulo the fact that there is no universal IM protocol).

He is describing work emails, as a "todo list" as he puts it. You get such emails from your colleagues or business partners. They generate work for you and you cannot just reply and forget about them. You need to work a long time (either doing research or the actual work), and get to that email thread later. It is a "shared" todo list, and you send messages to synchronize the state.

Google's Inbox is built exactly for this purpose, although I believe pg wants something more revolutionary.

Yeah, I know what he's talking about. That use case is exactly how people make use of direct messaging and notifications these days.

Have you recently bought a car through text messaging? Lots of people do that now. They text four or five sales reps at different dealerships, they all run off to do work, then they come back with the best prices and you negotiate entirely through that channel.

Have you recently bought hair extensions through text messaging? Lots of people do that, and entire field sales force are managed and communicated to with text messaging.

Do you work with 25-35yo somethings? Guess how you're getting most of your work instructions these days. It's text messaging.

Have you seen the additional UI/UX changes? Do you know about how a big group of ex-Apple employees rolled off to spin up their own text messaging company that extends the purpose of SMS with additional functionalities that's now more and more common place in-app before we see it roll out to the first party channels.

Email is fax. Tech grows up. Keep up when you can.

In addition to being condescending, most of this is false.

Your examples are bizarre. Buying hair extensions is a tiny niche market to begin with. The percentage of people buying cars from dealers via text message is a rounding error, and I highly doubt that they would have been using email to do it a decade ago, so it's completely irrelevant.

Text messages and similar are fundamentally no different from email except that they have a few limitations that limit their use cases (length, subject lines, attachments, etc). If those limitations are removed...you basically have email again.

I get all my instructions from my manager, product manager, and VP through email. The only time we communicate digitally in non-email ways is to share pictures/diagrams on Slack.

> Kids these days don't bother with email.

This seems to be a life phase, not a long term trend.

Not from what I'm seeing. Companies running on WeChat, WhatsApp, and the ever popular Slack. My immigration attorney asked to connect on WhatsApp to avoid email. All anecdotal, but I'm old enough to remember things before we had email and the people mentioned above aren't young either.

I think you have to be in some fairly specific companies to think this is normal.

Everywhere else you have a company email account and it's your principle way to have a paper trail.

"Not using email" is definitely a kids phase. Then you go work for a non-startup company and email is everything.

An ambitious startup idea would be oust Microsoft Outlook from this role - find a way to globally distribute the meeting room asset tracking stuff securely and seamlessly.

> "Not using email" is definitely a kids phase. Then you go work for a non-startup company and email is everything.

One of the companies I am talking about has revenue in the billions and operations across the globe and is publicly traded. The employees, young and old, want to communicate in real time, to get things done quickly. Many employees even have chat access to the highest levels of the company, including the CEO.

No one is disputing that they don't use chat. Everyone uses chat. But they also still use email. This company in question gives every employee an email address, right?

If you think a corporate-controlled email address will provide you with a paper trail when it counts, you're delusional. It will, however, work against you whenever it's convenient for your employer.

That's one reason for every lawyer's advice on corporate emails: anything older than at most 2 months must get automatically deleted, even when there is no interaction from you, preferably without exceptions. Things that require longer term storage should simply be printed out and stored offsite. Anything you find offensive, anything about your employment conditions, ... should likewise be printed out and go to offsite storage.

This is not destruction of evidence because you're doing this as a standard policy "to save space and to declutter" (hah !), not as a reaction to being sued. As to why that argument convinces anyone when large companies can reasonably be expected to get sued very regularly ... But it is pretty well established in legal precedent.

You can download the emails of course, but then the accusation that, firstly, this is against your contract (it probably is forbidden in your contract), and secondly the emails could be faked will definitely be there. And of course, policies are likely in place to prevent you from doing this, even if they're very unlikely to be effective.

The intent is not to provide that trail for you, but for the company. And this has many uses beyond going after a disgruntled employee.

> The intent is not to provide that trail for you, but for the company.

I felt like that little detail was very much missing from the conversation here and yet I feel it is very important.

Not having a paper trail is increasingly seen as a positive.

What does my paper trail get me? Evidence to be spun into a scenario that justifies firing me if the wind ever blows the wrong way.

> Companies running on WeChat, WhatsApp, and the ever popular Slack

Wow, all moving to proprietary, incompatible solutions. What an improvement kids are these days! It sounds like we are back in the 80s of computing. Thanks, I'll keep the email I can use virtually everywhere.

Old people text me now instead of calling or emailing. The habits of young people eventually change the habits of the whole society.

"Turns out it's not about new search engines but rather how to capture search intent. Amazon did that to beat Google."

This is very much doable nowdays for cheap. Hmm, I should stop slacking on my hobbies and roll one specialized search engine for something that I think will gain traction.

I wonder how much of that is true. The big difference for me between Google's results for buying things and Amazon's is how trustworthy they are.

Google's results are not trustworthy at all. Will there be a buy option at all behind a Google search result ? Good guess. Shipping available/reasonable ? Odds are not good. Not a scam ? ... not sure how to judge that one at all ... and of course there's no shortage of scams on the internet, some of which rank pretty well on Google.

Amazon is not optimal though. They're not reliable enough for my parents for instance. I guess the issue is that compared to a local store they still suck.

Still compared to Google and webshops, they're definitely the superior product.

Maybe, but not everything is about shipping, the are a lot of areas that sorely lack a specialized search, and have nothing to do with selling stuff.

> Kids these days don't bother with email.

Making predictions on what kids do is really, really bad. "hey my kid only cares about drinking and going out with friends", does not mean that he'll become a drunkard when they become adult.

When drunk kids all become drunk adults, does your analogy still hold?

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