Comment by anonymouse008 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymouse008 | Hacker News Reader

This article correctly assigns the key to success for all major technology paradigms — a “VisiCalc”

VR, AR, and Blockchain currently miss this value by a wide margin. If you think about it, that’s absolutely bonkers. Take VR/AR - a tech literally meant to create new worlds, remove the need to physically mold space into form a la Disneyland/world, and has become ultra portable where the supporting infrastructure is now all in headset…

But where is the absolute vital need? VisiCalc wasn’t just convenient (by replacing literal square feet of paper with a digital screen - removing the time to draft a new sheet), it was essential to financial survival for basically everyone (one error in a 100 cell, hand calculated budget could kill a company or lop net worth, or being able to add 100 cells in 1/10th the time could reveal opportunity , this is the age of “balancing a checkbook”).

So even with VR/AR’s infinite space, how does it keep companies from dying and create new possibilities? The current state of the art as described here was Disneyland and extreme training environments — but how do those things make or break companies? Oil and gas literally uses an MBA four grid system to triage accidents… they already have a relatedly equal solution for training: handle the errors.

Long winded way of saying I love this article and look for opportunities like this in everyday life.

I’m not sure if AR, VR or crypto will be big thing, but if they do, I’m sure it will happen like Internet did.

Internet was ”nowhere” in 1990. Now it’s everywhere.

There was no big bang. Change was in a way quite slow - zoom in, track it on weekly or monthly basis and you likely missed it happening. There was also ups and downs, negative predictions, legal hurdles, dotcom bubble burst, companies came and died.

There was also very few (if any) obvious things Internet could improve immediately. Things like ecommerce revolution required many, many small steps.

Internet was shit until it got its own VisiCalc: online advertising. After the dotcom bubble it was the only area that held well enough and could take advantage of the newfound aversion to paying for stuff online.

I was on the Internet since 1991. Usenet was great but it was hard to find other stuff. There were mailing lists for specialty topics and Archie and Gopher to find FTP sites. Then you'd have to use an FTP client to download files.

The creation of the World Wide Web and the graphical browser is what really made the Internet explode in popularity. When I came back to college in fall 1994 there were a lot of web sites and search engines to find sites. The ability to edit a text file and add more HTML links made it so easy to use and create.

That's, to me, one big problem of tech. It's jumped shark in many ways. Mainstream computing influenced by previous eras makes no sense. People don't need tools like companies since the 50s. It's another soil entirely. To an extent I even consider (pardon the following exaggeration) the mainstream computer market a fluffy distraction.. when I was a kid, my parents bought me a desktop. To do what ? office tasks at home. It was amazing, writing document on a screen, printing them in color. So cute, but it has no value anymore. It was just a twist on "you too now have access to big boys toys". Availability and all that. My brain cannot consider that we're selling sub watt pocket super computers so that people can whine on twitter or swipe pictures. I know some use are seriously useful, but it's becoming absurd to push things further to me. It's bubbly.

> so that people can whine on twitter

Whining on HN is virtuous, though?

At least it is less viral, and hopefully a little subtler. Most of the time, not always, I'm not aiming at a vapid rant, but trying to refine my intuition and understanding of things. I've been thinking a lot about computing, and after seeing 2-3 eras and their marketing cycles I got to wonder what was the point of all this and how much is really needed.

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