The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
cdixon.org
cdixon.org
The Internet was being widely written off as a toy that many couldn't ever imagine having practical applications.
Case in point, this widely-cited piece from 1998:
> The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
http://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/www.redherring.com...
Here are some fun things about this concept of toys turning into big things:
1. toys start out looking like toys, too
2. it's extremely difficult to distinguish the toys that will remain toys forever from those that will become "the next big thing."
A useful approach to the problem posed by (2) is to look at things that appear to be toys but refuse to die despite every indication that they should have done so long ago.
Toys that remain toys often have a trendiness and inelasticity to them that gives them naturally short lives. If you see a toy lingering long beyond the time it should have given up the ghost, you may be looking at the next big thing.
The next problem is that it can take a very long time for a toy to turn into the next big thing.
Big entrenched players are unable to see the next big thing, because they see the world through the glasses of their successful business. Microsoft for example almost missed the internet, and suddenly realized it in 1995. I believe Bill Gates was quoted as saying it was just a fad. The funny thing is that more than a decade earlier (about 1980) I heard the same thing about "personal computers" or "microcomputers". Just a fad. A toy. Never will compete with IBM's "real" computers, etc.
Similarly, these new fangled "automobile" thingies will never become popular. They are noisy. Smelly. Unreliable. Difficult to start. You can even break your arm if it kicks back while you are cranking it. And worst of all (gasp!) they frighten the horses! That's why these automobile thingies are just rich kid's toys. A fad.
I guess they couldn't see that all of those imperfections I listed could be fixed.
Back in the 1990s I saw this interesting tv program. Sorry, can't remember. It was about personal computers. The person being interviewed said the entrenched players NEVER see the next big thing coming. So they hire someone smart who will see it coming, and then tell them when its coming. And then when they are told this is the NEXT BIG THING! They never believe it.
Speaking of Microsoft almost missing the internet, they did entirely miss the new generation of smartphones starting with the iPhone. Ballmer laughed at the iPhone. They woke up to the new reality after it was too late. Sorry iPhone and Android already dominated. Smart phones sold in unit volumes that dwarfed PC unit volumes. Win Phone 7, followed by an incompatible Win Phone 8 didn't stand a chance -- even with nice Nokia hardware.
They almost succeeded, but Google would've canned their game eventually. Believe it or not, "free stuff" is popular.
Popcorn sold in unit volumes even higher than that, but so what? These aren't comparable things.
1. They do the same things. Both are general purpose computers. For some use cases, they both work fine.
2. They're about the same cost: ~$800 or so. But that's comparing flagship smartphone costs with entry-level desktop PC costs.
I suppose from hte perspective of a large company, a smartphone sale seems like it might be more or less valuable than a desktop PC sale depending on a variety of factors. So I think it's safe to say they are similarly comparable in that sense.
It would be kind of easy to make a stand against the microsoft fanboys against NT 4, but it was much more difficult to make a good case of Linux against Solaris back then. (Remember Linux starting to be taken seriously by 2.2 and 2.4 period)
Also i got the same dismissive snarks, when installing and programing in PHP back then to make dinamic websites, in a world then taken by ASP and Cold Fusion. (And the other alternative in Unix were only Perl, for which i thank PHP for avoiding me the trouble).
It's a reminder for me, that the most common trend in IT sector is of folks with a "colonized" sort of mentality, that will fail to recognize the things that will turn into real things in the future.
It's sad when you think that its even worse than that, giving most people just show off and wait for their next paycheck. They dont even bother thinking in those things.
So the psychological profile of who are saying what is kind a very big deal, not just what they are saying.
of course, these hypothetical legos would need plumbing and electrical infrastructure and maybe a few other things ;)
Lego represents the construction of objects from catalogs of standard components. That’s in comparison to carving unique, one off toys from raw wood.
Professional fabrication has followed in the footsteps of LEGO (and Lincoln Logs, Erector Set). If you use SketchUp to design a building you’ll notice it’s encouraged to use standard building components that can be picked from a library. Lots of those components can then be picked up at Home Depot. Ikea furniture kits are also similar to Lego (or at least the broader category of toy).
LEGO’s Mindstorms GUI programming model is very forward looking. LabVIEW and Simulink are picking up on those concepts & professional engineers are definitely using them.
And humans are very impatient and are driven toward immediate gratification.
I wonder if you went back to the very earliest days of the WWW, did everyone see it as a toy? Or were there already people (those developing it, perhaps) who saw that it had awesome non-toy potential?
I suspect people brand new tech as "toys" when they're not, and I bet there's also developers that take their toys and call them products :)
Maybe the solution is to completely discard the "toy" / "non-toy" dichotomy. It seems like it just muddies the discussion when the important thing is to evaluate the actual merits of the product/technology in question.
The WWW that was created to share scientific papers? Or you mean the GP's Internet that was created to organize the US troops on the event of a nuclear strike?
I guess so, there was plenty of people aware they were not toys. Most of those people did use them as toys most of the times, like everybody else at the time, but the toy classification was mostly from uninformed people and trolls.
Most of the citizens of the western world (even those with a degree) definitely pidgeon-hole expensive university projects as "toys", because they don't have one and don't see a need for one.
Academia is a weird place and is often underestimated.
While working at RAND on a scheme for U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to survive a “first strike,” Paul Baran conceived of the Internet and digital packet switching, the Internet's underlying data communications technology. His concepts are still employed today; just the terms are different. His seminal work first appeared in a series of RAND studies published between 1960 and 1962 and then finally in the tome “On Distributed Communications,” published in 1964.
https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html
Baran's original packet (block) switched networks development papers, and in fact his entire catalogue, are available at RAND:
"On Distributed Communications I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks"
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html
(This and the others are listed at the first link.)
Compuserve, AOL and newsgroups were already big when I discovered the www - Compuserve and newsgroups seemed vastly superior to me at the time.
Netscape Navigator seemed so basic, and how would anyone know which URLs to use (discoverability)? I chuckled, wrote it off, and stuck with what I knew.
Well, I was just a little bit wrong :)
A wonderful 1 minute snippet of David Bowie explaining how huge of a deal it’s going to be to a skeptical interviewer in the 90s
But there are still more technical problems to solve before the killer application and corresponding headset will be cheap, useful, and lightweight enough for mass adoption.
But despite every big company throwing a couple billions at the problem for the last few years (Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of oculus, Google's $500 million investment into Magic Leap, Apple's acquisition of Metaio/ARkit, Microsoft Hololens), all we have are literal toys!
So now you can't talk about AR as a serious subject anymore. People all dismiss it, saying we are still too early. I imagine it's like that for every "toy to big thing" transition.
Altair was a toy. Atari 2600 was a toy. TRS-80, Sinclair Spectrum, Apple II — all toys. Amiga was almost not a toy, and Aople Macintosh and IBM PC were mostly not toys anymore.
From there on, businesses started to use massive amounts of PCs, thanks to killer apps like word processors and spreadsheets.
Prices fell, home users took note, and a real explosion began.
It took mere 20 years, say, from 1980 to 2000.
On that note, who knows what would AR require in order to take off. It probably needs to be something you can get 80% of the killer features without wearing glasses. It also needs to support whatever frames glass wearers want to wear. It might require actual visual implants as I don’t think there’s a way to turn a contact lens into a display.
It of course had a large external induction coil to power it, and very low resolution.
Alternatively taking a long view, how many times do you think the dominant form factor of personal computers (in the general sense, including smart phones) will change? Another 3 times, another 5? Every 20 years forever?
The only exception I can think of is a direct neural link, but that’s generations away and even then I’m not entirely convinced. Maybe in the very long term.
What about contact lenses?
Voice is much too slow, as is listening - might as well use the current devices at those speeds.
Computers started with bookkeeping and mass production control. It took quite some time for them to penetrate office market or to (partially) replace the previously used communication tools.
I guess there are two and a half possible mistakes here, which I'll address separately.
1. The Network is a toy. No. At least as far back as the Treaty of Bern (in 1874) the importance of the global Network is so obvious that national governments give up a little sovereignty to have it work better. Communication makes the difference almost everywhere almost all the time. Bern of course is about written letters, but the Telephone follows the exact same course, and so if you accept the Internet as a natural successor all the same things apply.
2. Maybe the Internet is not the Network? This argument looks completely reasonable in 1986 when IP networks are mostly an American phenomenon and there is a lot of X.25 out in the rest of the world. Maybe the Network will be X.25. By 1996 that's a distant memory, everything is IP. It's a done deal, the Internet is the Network.
2.5. Mistaking the Web for the Internet. The Web initially looks like a toy. HTTP/0.9 era Web has lots of toy-like qualities. Academics have been designing powerful hypermedia technology for many years by 1990, surely this half-arsed tech demo from a CERN guy who isn't even a Computer Scientist is a flash in the pan? You can make a better argument that the Web is still a toy in 1996 than the Internet, I don't think it's a good argument but it can be made -- however the Web is just an application. A competitor hypermedia solution that crushes Tim's Web but uses IP is still the Internet.
There was a definite split in opinion with some writing it off as a toy and some smart and informed people thinking it the next big thing (eg Gates https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/)
I wonder how big the fax machine's impact on the economy actually was; I feel like it probably was quite large. Not nearly as large as the internet, of course.
Looking forward, smart homes and 3D printing are 2 industries that fall in this bucket. Both feel like toys to the majority of the market right now, but have the potential to completely change how we live.
3D printing - low-cost manufacturing has completely revolutionized what's possible for startups, and developed a large hobbyist following, but we haven't scratched the surface of how they can change day-to-day life for everybody. Imagine what's possible once they support more material types (metal, electrical circuits, food, etc) and every home has one, like an oven.
Smart homes - we just have fancy remote controls so far, but eventually we'll be living like Tony Stark with homes that constantly adapt to us without input. This is where we'll see the benefit of ambient computing present itself clearest. Imagine a home that helps you raise your child, keep your chores in order, or handle the repetitive tasks without requiring a primary care-taker to be responsible for keeping the home in order.
disclaimer: I'm building Hiome (https://hiome.com) to turn smart homes into more than just toys, so maybe I'm a little biased.
The next big thing will start out looking like a business! Wahey!
I've messed with smart home stuff and so far the only thing that has been useful beyond being a toy is our robot vacuum, which I'm not sure is really classified as a smart home thing.
As someone that lives in California, something that could be an actual $$ and time saver rather than just a toy is if I could have a system that would open windows rather than turning on the AC when the outside temperature is low enough.
This is amusing to me, I think as soon as something becomes somewhat common it will no longer be classified as "smart home". Sort of like how the definition of AI is a moving target.
We have a robot vacuum and robot mopper. Me going over and pressing the robot vacuum button, then once its done, placing the robot mopper in position and pressing the start button, is using smart devices but isn't a smart home. If I can tell a central system to "clean the kitchen" and it starts the vacuum, and when that's done dispatches the mopper, that's a smart home.
I know higher end iRobots can do this sort of thing in their dedicated app. And if you can control that via a smart home hub then that would be smart home functionality to me.
Great point -- outsourcing control leads to logic that can improve and be coordinated between unrelated systems.
> If I can tell a central system
Or better yet, not need to tell it, and have your kitchen cleaned while you're at work, possibly with a phone notification if you really want it. Probably just a passive history+status interface normally, though, once you trust it.
Obviously a vacuum cleaner could have heuristics to tell when you're out (clocks and radar etc) but that's just a dead-end solution when your thermostat and your lights and your curtains and your security system all want to know too.
Another is to have blinds that open just before sunrise, so that you can sleep in darkness but wake up with the sun (especially useful if you're in a city). This is what I do myself, but it's a pain to change anything because the legacy motorized shades don't integrate with anything.
Robot vacuums didn't achieve this for me, I'd have to spend more time removing "clutter" from the floor than I would vacuuming and half the time it'd get stuck on something anyway. Some of that clutter was me being messy, but some of it was things I liked to keep handy under the couch. As advanced as they are, they're still stupid machines that don't properly adapt to humans.
However, I got out once I realized that speed of prints mattered a lot of consumers. And the current methods of consumer 3D printers were FDM (fused deposition modeling) and Stereolithography, which both had asymptotic limitation on how fast you can get a print to go. For FDM, there's a head you need to shunt back and forth. For Sterolithography, the consumer printers like Form 1 had a mechanical step between each layer.
Unlike chips with Moore's law or LEDs with Haitz's law, 3D printers aren't going to get much faster. That's when I got out.
So in order to get an order of magnitude faster print, someone needed to invent a completely different method--a step function.
So I think it's not just that it's a hobby, but you might need another criteria, like there's at least a plausible incremental path to improvement along the parameter that the market would care about.
[1] Names like 'Replicator' conjuring visions of Star Trek when the thing most printers were able to produce were variants of piles of expensive plastic spaghetti when prints go wrong.
For 3d printers etc we have alternatives that are fine; we don't actually need them for anything urgent.
Others would include Uber/Lyft, Airbnb, GitHub, ...
There are only a few that would qualify that I can think of - Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.
If folks here have other examples or thoughts on why this does or doesn't hold true would love to hear them.
Early Air Bed and Breakfast charging people for couch surfing and selling Obama O's (https://www.airbnb.com/obamaos) to fund their startup definitely feels toy like to me.
I'd argue there are entire categories that are currently considered toys, but eventually with the right business model, tech improvements and cultural changes will make the serious billion dollar tech companies we have now look like toys.
Edit: Technology, not product, and Netflix example
Sometimes you gotta wait a few decades to see where things go.
Earlier electric and hydrogen powered vehicles I've seen appear similarly to have been created as functional replacements for horse-drawn vehicles.
Maybe you could expand your comment to demonstrate your point?
The second in turn links to https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/climate-change-will-push-ca... . When they say "cars are an expensive toy for the rich" they're saying figuratively that cars aren't reliable nor efficient. I don't think anyone would disagree that [important, useful] new technologies tend to get cheaper and more efficient over time.
It's really not clear, if this is the sort of backing to the "toy" claim what it is hoped to prove?
The early users appeared to use cars for transportation, which the second link doesn't contradict, so not literal toys. The "toy" claim is just a perjorative that the link appears, implicitly, to say was used by those who were already profiting from horse related industry.
The oft-printed statement that early automobiles were ‘playthings of the rich’ until Henry Ford’s super-cheap Model T started rolling off the assembly line in October 1908, is easily proven by scanning the makes of high-priced chariots and their wealthy owners who participated in the Amsterdam Evening Recorder’s Saturday, July 10, 1909 “Sociability Run” from Amsterdam to Lake Luzerne.
Everything I've ever seen indicates cars were considered to be "toys" for the rich when they first came out. Roads were not really designed for them. They were insanely expensive. They were not generally considered to be serious new tech that would eventually compete as transportation.
That changed when Henry Ford made cars affordable for the masses.
Old laws often said things like "You must have someone walk in front of your car ringing a bell so you don't spook the horses." This implicitly tells you that early cars were also extremely slow and horses were the form of serious transportation that the culture revolved around.
Half of all households (based on ~4 persons per household) didn't own an automobile until between 1945-1950. Ownership didn't cross the 10% threshold until the 1930s.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cy898/durin...
Internet Archive mirror, should be accessible.
I think when people say they were toys, they mean that in the same sense that a Spyker or Ariel Atom are "toys" today.
I remain unconvinced, however, that an early ICE-powered automobile was nothing but a temperamental toy that the owner really, really wanted to be practical. I've hung around with enough people with Ford Model Ts (my parents also had a Ford A for a while) to suspect that something built twenty years prior to the Ford T had to be laughably unreliable. Because I only rely on a T to get me to work if my boss were pretty laid back. :-)
I see it starting with small tweaks to reality...a dingy concrete sidewalk replaced with a golden brick road. Empty walls in an apartment awash with art, scenic views, and/or entertainment.
And it’s wrong not because of the “toy” part but because of the “next big thing” part.
There is absolutely no guarantee of a ”next”, a ”big” or “a thing“ coming, regardless of origin.
A different future is not inevitable, at best it’s a toss up. This last decade went for inertia. Next one? Who knows...
If you looked at PCs from 1993-2003 you would've had a similar view. PCs from 1983-1993 underwent dramatic progress: you went from 16-color TV outputs, 64K of RAM, 8-bit CPUs, floppies, command-line interfaces, and BASIC to 24-bit color, 3D computer graphics, GUIs, 16MB of RAM, 200+ MB hard disks, 32-bit CPUs, IDEs, desktop publishing, CD-ROMs, modems and Internet access, even speech recognition and text-to-speech on some Apple machines. From 1993-2003, you had incremental progress: Microsoft won, Windows 3.1 became Win95 and then eventually Win2k, CPUs got faster, RAM and disks expanded, broadband happened, but what we used the computer for didn't change much, except for the advent of the Internet. The Internet itself was supposed to revolutionize computing, but the dot-com bust happened in 2001 and in 2003 it was still pretty much a toy. And other much-hyped developments like WebTV, VR, voice recognition, and AI had fallen flat.
There are plenty of toys that are still in Irruption now. Cryptocurrency was supposed to change the world; the bubble burst in 2018, but maybe we'll see it come back in 2020 with DeFi the way the Internet did in 2005 with social media. Drones are literal toys right now. So is VR & AR. There's been a lot of progress in computing for kids with things like Scratch, RoBlox, or Minecraft.
From the article:
> Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs.
So instead of asking if it "looks like a toy", what if we asked, which of those products started out by "undershooting" user's needs?
In that lens, I think you could make arguments for a few of those having started by "undershooting." The most obvious example to me is Amazon starting out as an online bookstore.
edit: I just want to add that from my vantage point this might be a true idea, but it gives very little actionable information. Perhaps Christensen's books give better insight on why this is something we should care about.
Bitcoin is not a toy, but follows in the footsteps of those toys (in addition to traditional currencies).
"When we first started working on Snapchat in 2011, it was just a toy. In many ways it still is – but to quote [Charles] Eames, 'Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas.' "
[0] https://www.snap.com/en-GB/news/post/2014-axs-partner-summit...
Skype feels like a bad examples it was always fairly obvious video chat would be prevalent eventually. It was never obvious that Skype was the best answer, and there were Skype alternatives with similar offerings which have failed.
Skype itself may not last the long run if it can’t keep up with zoom or whatnot.
http://oldtelephones.com/blog/2012/04/25/bell-telephone--wes...
I’m also generally skeptical of revisionist narratives. People often say no one saw X coming, no one saw apps on a phone or a screen with buttons etc etc. But it seems hundreds or thousands of writers, designers, futurists, failed technologists and so on did predict these things. The hard part is building them and then creating a system (eg financed hardware) to create widespread adoption.
Often technologies are available long before they ever catch on with the mainstream. There were several PDAs sold in the 90s, and at least one had a built-in telephone. The Buick Reatta had a touch screen center stack in the late 1980s.
Technology adoption is weird. There needs to be the perfect storm of integration, marketing, and (for lack of a better term) zeitgeist to really make something mainstream. And even with all those things, it still takes YEARS to really get there. Think about how long techies were downloading TV shows/movies before streaming really took off -- Windows Media Center came out in 2002! That's a full six years before Netflix started its streaming service, which itself took several years to take off.
If you ever watch "The Graduate" and the guy gives the college grad advice to go into "plastics" because it's the next big thing, that's computers in the 80's and the Internet in the 90's.
People were quick to latch on to the web because it facilitated things they really wanted to do like keep in touch with friends and buy things easily. Cryptocurrency doesn't do that for most of the population. PC's were a hobbyist thing at home and more akin to cryptocurrency, but at the same time they were completely taking over how business operated.
The web had a similar impact on small businesses too. Having a web presence exposed small companies to a much larger customer base than they could have ever hoped for before.
Cryptocurrency doesn't really solve real-world problems like this. Most people are perfectly fine using traditional currency and wouldn't see any benefit to replacing that with Bitcoin, et al.
Edit: I think the most recent change that you might have been around for was the introduction of the iPhone and the smart phones that followed. Huge paradigm shift for the general population.
The immediate benefits of the Internet were obvious, and much more interesting than any theoretical "take over the world" growth story. People were willing to tackle slow connections, bad UIs and device configuration hell so that they could get chatting on IRC or posting on Usenet or downloading files from weird/shady FTP servers.
With cryptocurrency, there's nothing new or interesting you can actually do, no meaningful human connections to be made. It's just speculating on a made-up growth story, like penny stocks you can trade 24/7 — but we already had penny stocks and boiler room scams.
You really should look into that tech (Blockchain, DLT) a bit deeper. This sounds exactly like the "It's just a toy it's never gonna change the world." that people said about literally anything that changed the world. Yet that toy is here since 10+ years and it's not going away anytime soon. (Not talking about Bitcoin that could still end anyday)
The speculation/trading/scams etc. are the "kids" playing with the toy. One day value will move like data and people will question why it took so long to implement this. Exchanging data for value will be normal and young people will ask how it ever could work without that. Kids will aks if it's true that back in the days people who inserted data into the internet had to pay for it and not the people who consumed the data. The internet really works backwards because we do not yet have the "internet of value". The whole internet runs on ads instead.
As always when it comes to this topic I suggest David Schwartz's speak at We are Developers - World Congress Berlin https://youtu.be/Lxqz_NlX3GI
How is this different from using a credit card to e.g. purchase a streaming movie? Is it just more seamless? Or does the fact that there isn't a centralized bank behind the transaction somehow significant for the consumer or business?
(I'm really just trying to understand this btw)
> Kids will aks if it's true that back in the days people who inserted data into the internet had to pay for it and not the people who consumed the data.
If I understand correctly, the current situation is that there are free services where you can upload/insert data, free services where you can download/consume—and there are paid services for both too.
Could you elaborate on what the difference would be there? Anyone who creates/hosts content does so for free, and the people who consume it always pay?
1994 Internet let you talk to people and exchange information around the world — things that you couldn’t do before.
2019 cryptocurrency lets you pay for something, sort of, not really, but will be very clean one day — never mind that millions are already paying for things and sending money because “it’s a dumpster fire”.
You could. There were phones and snail mail after all, weren't there?
They were slow an expensive just like wire transfers between US and EU bank accounts are: 2-3 workdays and a $35-45 fee to move around a few bytes in existing financial messaging systems. Pure madness.
In Europe, transfers between all banks are becoming instantaneous starting Jan 2020: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...
The cost is pennies.
No need for a crypto-anything solution.
Also a Tx taking hours and costing 25 bucks is absolutely not going to allow the Internet of Value to show it's possibilities. It may be acceptable to buy something and let it be ship to you. but what about services? instant services how could they be paid with such a system.
Watch the youtube video linked above if you want to get an idea of the IoV. It's on a completely different scale. Value streaming a fraction of a cent at a time. Instant and basically free.
They even provide a nice built-in feature called "chargeback" in case the service isn't what I expected. Cryptocurrencies don't seem to care about that part of customer experience at all.
(Btw, when you say "just watch this YouTube video about an amazing business opportunity", what I hear is: "I believe you're a sucker".)
>Cryptocurrencies don't seem to care about that part of customer experience at all.
The idea which again is described in the video which you don't want to watch makes "chargebacks" something you do not need in many cases. The data/value streaming just stops if one side stops hence you don't need any agreement or contract. You pay for what you get and if you stop paying the other will stop as well. Some services obviously don't work that way and there will always be use for a third party middleman who takes the risk, guaranties service/money for both sides. The idea isn't to destroy all the business agreements that exists and then start them all again but use some fancy new way to pay each-other that does the exact same thing just differently. The idea is that a whole new sector of services will become possible because of that new tech.
I don't feel the need to convince you into anything I just think you aren't aware of the fundamental changes the new tech can bring because all you saw is Bitcoin. I suggested the video purely because he explains the vision of the IoV very accurate. He's not gonna tell you to buy shitcoin XY or trow money into companies that try to build stuff with that new tech. If you watch it and think that this all will never happen, that's fine who knows. At least we talk about the same Idea then.
Here is the link again https://youtu.be/Lxqz_NlX3GI Should be quite interesting for anyone in the tech/IT space even if one completely disagrees with his vision.
I receive a lot of payments from the US and I have never seen a wire transfer that takes less than a few days to arrive. This is consistent with the info given on Bank of America's website: the fee is $35 when sending foreign currency, $45 when sending USD, time 1-2 workdays. https://www.bankofamerica.com/foreign-exchange/wire-transfer... Chase: fee $40, time 3-5 workdays. https://www.chase.com/digital/wire-transfer
Even $25 for that is absolutely insane price, as instantaneous and free transfers within the European SEPA system demonstrate. Nothing comparable to SEPA exists for dealing with rest of the world. Express delivery services like Fedex deliver physical items faster from the US to Europe than payments move over digital channels.
The situation is even worse for businesses that deal internationally with larger sums of money and may have to take significant hits from currency fluctuations during slow transactions. There are billions to be saved annually with systems like RippleNet (xRapid).
Internetworking realized the vast potential of all the computers in the world. They could do so much more if talking to each other.
Crypto via "proof of work" takes all the unused computing capacity everywhere and creates an incentive to waste it.
What it seems like to me is a hybrid virus that uses both human minds and machines to spread and suck up resources.
You just made a string of assertions without explanation, so why do you think these things?
Yes there are people telling that PoW and Bitcoin is the best and all other systems are flawed. They are called Bitcoin Maxis, their arguments usefully fall flat when you apply logic. They don't even agree with each other about which Bitcoin is the real Bitcoin.
>BTC is still the most successful cryptocurrency
How do you measure success of a cryptocurrency? Also being the first gives huge advantage for "success". Like Whatsapp which is probably the most successful instant messenger but does that mean it's the best? It takes time to dethrone something like Whatsapp or Bitcoin just having the better tech isn't enough to instantly make everyone switch.
>You just made a string of assertions without explanation, so why do you think these things?
You have any specific question? I don't really know what I should explain. If you are interested in alternatives to PoW you should lookup XRPL Consensus (Federated Byzantine agreement) a variant of this is also uses by the Stellar Consensus Protocol. Then there is PoS which is the most known alternative. DPoS is building on top of that idea. Then there is PoWeight, Tangle, Hashgraph and some other less popular and/or not (yet) working ideas/theories.
For the consumer, streaming value doesn't need any kind of subscription. It doesn't even require a contract. You do not need to stream from netflix because that's what you already have an pay for monthly. You pay whoever gives you what you want. It's kinda like if you could use cash without the obvious downsides of physically moving coins and with the ability to split it in whatever fraction you'd like. Please watch the youtube video. He explains this way better than I could. It goes down to the level of IP data packages. Something similar could be made (is being made) with value.
>If I understand correctly, the current situation is that there are free services where you can upload/insert data, free services where you can download/consume—and there are paid services for both too.
Most of the content people access on the internet is "free" as in no need to pay for it other than pay for the internet access. Same is also true for "inserting" as in upload it somewhere. However physically inserting it (hosting) isn't free even if you find a free host it's just paid by someone else. Hence hosting (inserting) costs while pulling is mostly free. Every other market works exactly the opposite way. You can't get an apple for free at any store. There is no way someone else is gonna pay the apple for you if you just look at some ads.
If the internet would work more like a store, some people would insert data and other people would access/download and they would pay for that directly not let someone else pay in exchange for horrible userexperiences, horrible privacy, huge additional traffic waste etc. All of that could really only turn successful because data started moving freely over the internet and it grew exponentially while moving value basically has not changed at all.
Instead of cashing the debt out you can just send that debt to someone else. This is called transaction but as you already know there is nothing to move. It just adjust balances of debt. You tell the bank that a part of what they owe you should now be owed by someone else. If its someone is using the same bank then this is super simple. If he is form another bank the 2 Banks must work together to update the balances over 2 systems. If the 2 Banks do not have any relationship with each-other then they need to find corresponding banks and create a chain of trusted relationships to move that debt around. This is why Tx from account to account of the same banks is super simple fast and cheap/free but the further you go the longer it takes and the more Banks in between want some kind of fee for the service. It comes to the point where you simply can't make a transaction anymore because either the fees are way to high or there just isn't a bank to bank to bank chain that could move the debt. Or of course there are billions of people who do not have a bank. There are payment companies who fill in that gap where you can input a bank transaction (debt) and they deliver cash etc. It's sill expensive and slow in most cases and it absolutely does not work with small value(debt) Tx. There is no way to send 1USD from USA to Mexico for an acceptable fee and in an acceptable time.
If you could send value instead you could avoid literally all these problems. Value is value everywhere it doesn't matter where you send it from and where you send it to. There is no need for cooperating banks. It's like if you could pay cash but globally (without the different currencies of course because value is currency independent). Imagine if value would be represented by gold. I buy gold worth 1 USD and send it anywhere in the world and the person who gets it sells it for his local currency. Now replace the gold with crypto because gold can not be send over the internet but cryptos can. Everywhere, very fast/cheap (not with BTC) and without any chain of trusted entities in between the endpoints.
It's also final unlike debt Tx which can be reversed by the banks and payment provider in between. Which is bad for the endpoints but also for the corresponding bank chains since they all have to take the risk of reversed Tx which leads to higher fees.
You're proposing a scenario in which all banks collapse and FDIC insurance fails, but also one in which my computer continues to be a productive member of the bitcoin network and my neighbor will sell me access to his bunker for 3 bitcoins. And my ISP won't be upset that I can't pay them in USD.
If I was worried about the collapse, I think I'd want to store my money in something with real value, not imaginary internet coins that none of my neighbors have ever heard of. Maybe gold, to be cliche. Canned food?
You can trust your bank you choose the one you want to trust. But what about a companies who hav to deal with foreign banks or what about banks who have to deal with other banks. what if the best choice is still bad and should not be trusted. Value Tx can solve this because they are trust less.
In terms of "who pays," well, I doubt people who currently don't pay will somehow decide to pay while free services remain available (even if at the cost of getting targeted ads/loss of privacy). If anything, right to be targeted is the real "value" that is being (and presumably will continue to be) exchanged.
Given that, blockchain may be in a similar state to the early-middle Internet. It's out there, you can play with it, it's neat and seems useful even if for most people that practical purpose is elusive. Maybe someone has yet to create the Netscape that turns it into a must-have tech, but it might be happening as we speak.
(Edit: TCP/IP came out in 1983, and HTTP in 1990. In 1995, the year of the Netscape IPO and when everyone "knew" the web was a big deal, there were 40 million Internet users. Now there are about 32 million Bitcoin wallets. I think some of the other answers are remembering things a bit later in time, or more colored by hindsight.)
On the other hand, quantum is much farther out. The percentage of people who have used a quantum computer at all is minuscule. When it does become useful, it may be too expensive to see mass adoption for decades.
Wow, what a throwback in time! I had completely forgotten that. Thanks for the sweet memories!
Also, I agree with your take. One key difference re. cryptocurrencies might be legal context however. Internet wasn't stepping on governments toes, more like disruption of the telco sector (which was already focused on emerging mobile at the time, a decade prior to smartphones). I'm not so sure the road is wide open for alternative currencies, because central banks and, oh, stability of the economy etc. It's a much tougher sell.
Blockchain itself however, the tech, may have killer-apps and uses — either as an evolution of currencies, or decoupled entirely from 'currency' (trustless secured distributed databases may fit many needs IMHO, notably for social purposes like contracts or unhackable communication).
Need Magazine articles and TV shows at the time were hyping the internet and the web. I think they were about right. Mainstream media didn’t really catch on until the 00s.
I was anticipating a complete revolution that would change everything. I remember repeatedly telling my parents how it was going to change the world. They weren’t dismissive but also didn’t think it was really going to be something for them. Eventually they relented and I got a modem - so I could surf the small number of websites available.
In retrospect I was incorrect in that it has changed everything more than I imagined it would. I didn’t see mobile phones as the main access point, for example.
As for the comparison with crypto and quantum, only quantum has the potential to make a comparable impact on our lives and it would likely be totally different in that quantum will be indirectly impactful, at least for the foreseeable future, whereas the internet was and is most impactful when actually used by the individual. It feels a bit silly to compare crypto (a clever but relatively simple idea for electronic currency that is currently producing a lot of CO2 and suffers from other huge problems) vs quantum computing (a revolutionary technology that has and will require major breakthroughs in theoretical physical and engineering, vast sums of investment and some of the smartest minds working for generations to enable previously unrealisable control of the physical word and paradigm-shifting computation). Real quantum is also a long way off.
If you want a more near-term tech that I am as excited about now as I was about the internet in the 90s, it is without a doubt VR. It’s going to change everything.
1991 - I am 8 years old and am learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20
1992 - My family gets an XT-class machine (640kB of RAM!)
1993 - NCSA Mosaic is released.
1994 - An Internet Cafe opens in my small town of 35,000. Using library books, I manage to find cool software to download onto 5 1/4" floppies and bring home.
1995 - I get my first C compiler (Power C) and start programming my own games (still on my XT). I start spending time at a local LAN gaming place, wishing for a better computer.
1997 - my family gets a Pentium 133, dial-up Internet, and shortly thereafter I discover Linux. I also build a 386 from parts that I scrounge up.
1999 - I get a job working at the LAN shop as a tech. The company has shifted to being a PC Hardware and repair shop.
2000 - I get 1.5mbit DSL at home, build my own Celeron 433, and dive way deeper into programming.
Crypto-currency first showed up around, what, 2010 or so? In those 9 years, I don't think there's been anywhere near the kind of (pardon the pun) quantum leap we had technology- and utility-wise in the 90s.
The other thing is that governments are greatly hindering growth. Enterprises really want to get involved but are forced to take it slow and be careful of all their actions for fear of legal reprocussions. Of course governments aren't happy and don't want to support it because it puts government currency at risk, as noted by US representatives.
Computers were very much about creativity and doing work.
I used an Apple Macintosh in 89/90 to access Usenet and it was a whole other world and the flood of information that came with the web took it to another level.
Crypto/Quantum don't really have the same impact for the average person. Quantum is just different hardware to do the same thing (though make some calculations feasible to execute in hours/minutes rather than the users lifetime)
Crypto will probably stay niche like other alternate payment methods like barter cards or the technology becomes part of the underlying mainstream infrastructure that no one sees along with all those billions of lines of COBOL.
Instagram is the most recent example of a revolutionary toy - when everyone thought social media was a puzzle solved by Facebook, Instagram cut the fat and became a more elegant tool to getting a message across (and making some money in the process).
I could see Slack's fun approach to workflow automation and collaboration take off, but maybe I'm biased by what I'm investing my own time into learning.
Another factor is that investment in tech is dramatically higher today that it was 20 years ago (partly due to success that early investors had) and people are willing to invest in anything that looks like a 'toy' in the off chance it pays off.
VR is. The incremental changes are not yet enough to make them practical for non-gaming use (and even gaming, they are amazing, but cumbersome). AR is firmly still in the toy camp.
Here’s a recorded talk and more info: http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/jan/04/wonderland-how-play...
So while agreeing with the rest of the article, Skype sounds like a wrong example. It was a total replacement for phone calls from day one. I never made, and maybe received only about 10, calls to/from my U.S. customers since getting on Skype, PSTN immediately lost me as a long-distance client.
Gave a friend anxious to try self-driving a link. He then asks me what is GitHub? I explain it and he tells me, what is this some sort of tech toy? I could tell that he began to lose interest.
I well remember talking to people about getting on the Internet in 1994 and as soon as they found out they'd have to install a tcp/ip stack on Windows 3.1 they too soon lost interest.
I believe against all odds that Comma.ai just might be one of the eventual winners in the self driving market. Which is crazy because they're battling people who've invested billions of dollars. By coincidence the partner who brought Comma.ai to Andreesen Horowitz is Chris Dixon! Coincidence?
Personally I'm just waiting for them to add support for Ford.
There is a similar approach being taken in the eVTOL space, with Kitty Hawk trying to develop their Heaviside as an obvious toy for the rich (single seater, short range, "quiet"). I think people will refuse to allow so much noise pollution in the skies, not to mention the inherent question of safety as all these designs make serious compromises to flight stability in order to make them so lightweight and take off vertically.
There is merit to this approach though - you could certainly argue hypercars are toys for the super rich and eventually that technology trickles down to cheaper vehicles. But the economics around racing cars are much more complicated, including making an entire sport (and an extremely popular one at that) to justify the development costs. You could also argue Tesla did this, starting with the Roadster, then the Model S, and now the Model 3. Tesla's financials have been a source of great debate for a decade now though.
Whatever the next big thing is, I bet the media hasn't caught onto it yet. I don't think it's VR, AR, self-driving cars, general AI, or anything else that has already been woefully overhyped. It'll be something nobody was looking for and the right person stumbles upon it at the right place and time.
The notion of having a HUD for my eyes everywhere I go sounds neat at first, until I think about it a bit more and it just seems like sensory overload. I can always just pull out my phone if there's something I want to know, and that thing is already pretty invasive when it comes to my daily living - do I really need something more than that?
When it happens, we'll know. The iPhone was famously expected to be such a failure that Verizon refused to be a carrier. Microsoft also joked about Apple being able to make a smart phone. Blackberry felt the same way. The only company that took them seriously was Google with Android.
Out of curiosity, what is it you think AR will revolutionize? What do you consider the killer app?
AR has a clear advantage over VR here as you wouldn't be blind to your real surroundings so you'd still be able to talk with the people in real life too (and not look like a doofus who walks into walls)
Or perhaps new technologies are solutions in search of a problem, and without any concrete sense of self and hierarchy, user "needs" can get artificially inflated to infinity...
Kind of how people "needed" cigarettes in 1950, and "needed" bell bottoms in the 70s, and "need" a good smartphone camera today (because of course they also "need" to broadcast to their friends and everybody else what they ate for dinner, their latest selfie, and their life 24/7) -- even if nobody on the receiving end really cares, except perhaps their parents and grandparents...
'Asked about how the Ariane 5 compares to lower-cost alternatives on the market today, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, Stefano Bianchi, Head of ESA Launchers Development Department, responded with a question of his own. “Are you buying a Mercedes because it is cheap?”
Ranzo, sitting nearby, chimed in and referenced the India-based maker of the world’s least expensive car. As he put it, “We don’t sell a Tata.”'
I really like Clay Christenen's ideas, but he dismissed the greatest recent disruption (smartphones) as "sustaining"... His theories are not predictive.
What actual toys are there? Especially new ones. def toy: fun/enjoyable/popular but useless.
video games (e.g. minecraft, pubg), social media (stackexchange, reddit, meme-makers), scooters, fidget spinners, drones, 3D printers, face swaps, shadertoy
I think seeing this tech as disruptive somehow is kind of obvious, but to change our lifes upside down it needs much more.
The same can be said about 3D printing. It has a lot of potential, but timing + the right ecosystem around it is also a big deal.
Apple with Newton, MS and specially Palm were there first for the pocket computer + phone, but why only with the iPhone things started to really happen?
The right bet + timing + ecosystem around it is also pretty important.
Drones Bitcoin Electric Scooters VR AR Voice recognition (Alexa, Siri, OK Google) 3d printer Robotics
what else?
I think bits are very limiting. My Iphone, no matter how good the apps are, will never be able to get up and clean up the kitchen, or build me a house for that matter.
unless looks like a toy is relative to the incumbents, but not to the population at large.
The emphasis is less on the implementation of the toy than on the popularity of the style of play or human amusement that the toy enables. Then over time various technologies come along to implement the mode of play. Eventually someone says, wow that might help in serious adult activity X. And then disruption.
Kubernetes, Tensorflow, Kafka, Falcon 9, iPhone, and Model S aren’t toys.
Video game AI, model rockets, iPod (limited to music playback), and RC cars are toys that predicted these modern, serious adult innovations.
The toy as predictor theory doesn’t require that all technologies begin as toys. So maybe Kubernetes & Kafka don’t fit (I can’t think of a relevant toy).
How things change and end up repeating the same old mistakes.
Communicating confidence is useful.
If you're going to attach a probability to an opinion, use "most likely", or "almost certainly", or "unlikely".