Ask HN: Is the tech industry out of ideas? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is the tech industry out of ideas?

4 points_moof12 comments

Potentially inflammatory question, but I'm asking with sincere curiosity. It feels to me that the transformative era of tech is over, and we are now in "maintenance mode," for lack of a better term. The '80s and '90s revolutionized computing, and the web matured into a real platform during the '00s and '10s. The big players grew from one- or two-person projects in literal or proverbial garages into firmly established global juggernauts. (In some cases this began in the '70s.) Whole industries—publishing, entertainment, transportation, retail, communication—were fundamentally changed, and whole new ways of connecting people were developed. New ideas and technologies were sprouting up everywhere, and they were exciting and solved obvious problems. It wasn't all roses of course, and there's much discussion to be had on the externalities, but it was undeniably revolutionary.

Now it seems, to me at least, that the party is more or less over. I'm wondering if anyone else feels this way or if I've simply become jaded and cynical. (I am prone to jadedness and cynicism so this is entirely possible.) Things like "the metaverse" and the bizarrely-named "web3" feel like desperate attempts to keep finding the next big thing in a field that has simply run out of big things to find. I can't identify a single small company working on something that feels like it'll be huge—the next Google, Netflix, or what have you. The spirit of the early days seems impossible to find now.

This is just my personal experience. I would love to hear both from people who feel this way and from people who disagree.

We're not out of ideas, not by a long shot. The reason you don't see any small companies working on something that looks like it'll be huge is that they all get gobbled up by the big boys.

Examples: Rare earth magnets are expensive, it turns out that there's a hard to synthesize but quite stable and useful form of Iron Nitride alpha Fe16N2 which at working temperature, is more powerful than rare earth magnets, and is being developed in the US.

There are folks here on HN who are poking around with ideas for tools that directly manipulate the tree structures that compilers build, to make far, far more powerful programming tools.

There are operating systems that don't trust things by default, they could get rid of the idea of virus scanning everything by making it obsolete.

To quote the old song "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades."

You could just as easily have said that smartphones were pointless in 2008, since they were too expensive, took way more effort to do simple things with and had no battery.

I prefer a bigger screen with a real keyboard and os, but many people don't and industries like mp3 players, point-and-shoot camera makers and even those who sold ring tones are essentially gone. Alarm clock makers must have seen their sales decline rapidly. On the other hand, entire new industries have started to make apps.

I have tried an occulus for minecraft and even though that was more than ten years ago I knew that that experience was different. I had jumped around in minecraft a lot, but this was the first time I got the same feeling in my stomach I would have had if I had been standing on the edge of that cliff. Even though it was all minecraft graphics and totally not real, it felt more real in away that no non-vr game can feel.

I don't know if the metaverse is the next big thing, and I hope that facebook doesn't own it, but dismissing things like toys are _exactly_ what happened to all the other things we take for granted.

Microcomputers were once dismissed as toys. They couldn't be used for real work, or run a real os.

Look at where we are now.

I think part of the deal with groundbreaking ideas is that people don't see them coming and/or think they're bad ideas until someone proves them wrong. Another problem is that you're not aware of all the fields that are changing. It's not just going to be all sexy CPUs and GPUs all the time, but for example, things like low-cost, decent density solid state LIDAR is going to be huge pretty soon. We've seen prices for LIDAR go from as much as a house to low four figures today and if Velodyne et al. achieve what they want, even three figures in the next few years (velarray, velabit, plus competitors). Cheap computers are going to be able to see in 3D in high fidelity soon; even robot vacuums have some LIDAR now.

Look at what patents are expiring, what fields are being juiced by macro moves in the industry (e.g. LIDAR with autonomous driving), and look for problems that are becoming or already are expensive and currently have no or just cumbersome solutions in the market at the moment.

> …look for problems that are becoming or already are expensive and currently have no or just cumbersome solutions in the market at the moment.

Any tips for how to find these?

The easiest way is to be in an industry. When you understand a set of products and the commercial drivers - the state of the art, you can start to try and identify inefficiencies and gaps. You can see where big companies are skirting around problems they don't consider profitable enough to be worth tackling. Obviously you can't work in and deeply know every industry, so maybe the answer is to go to trade shows and contemplate what products and services people are offering and try to sniff out opportunities or ideas to investigate. It'll help that you'll have SMEs on hand at such venues.

Nobody thought Netflix would be big at the time either. Nor the internet for that matter.

Part of the problem is that if you see something small you think will be big, depending on your position someone will either buy it or copy it.

For a company to go from 0 to massive, a lot of people with resources need to pass on the idea.

It depends on your perspective. As a youngling who just got their first iPhone and starts experimenting, they likely grok web3 fast and have several wallets setup, probably have a Twitter with a .eth handle and:

types in all lowercase and constantly talks about web3 and crypto

As a forty-something I just can't grok web3. It seems futile and unnecessary when you consider all that we have already. 'How much is enough?'

I imagine a lot of people my age are just coasting, making full use of already existing tech and don't seek 'the new shiny' since we've already done that in our youth and that game gets boring. We've done it. We've arrived. Tech still has its issues, but we don't complain.

Web3 isn't real, honestly. There's zero products made on it, just grifts, and what enthusiasts describe as the absolute bedrock foundations for a hypothetical new banking system (defi lending) - which is wrong anyway because banks don't want to play with collateral on a hundred different fake currencies, they just want a system to talk to each other to work with real currencies, and real money and crypto is fundamentally incompatible.

The whole thing is an embarrassing joke, and every good promised thing, from wind farms in Ghana to banking the unbanked hasn't happened as promised.

>the web matured into a real platform

No. No. No. No.

There's is much better ahead and it's not blockchain, or web3. It's not centralized mega corporations that abuse or leech off the fruits of civilization.

It's a unified theory of data management. It's a decentralized future of autonomous, interoperable communities with their own infrastructure who have power over what they choose to be and what happens to what they are and have.

The increased centralization and specialization has made it worthwhile for members of the communities to behave unethically. The potential fruits of a successful scam as a business as a politician as a clergyman have outweighed any potential downfall for at least 20 years. Government has failed to adapt to the massive population increases and has been exploited individually by DoS'ed institutions and that has inspired others in doing the same effectively creating a DDoS.

We can do much better, we must do much better.

> It's a decentralized future of autonomous, interoperable communities with their own infrastructure who have power over what they choose to be and what happens to what they are and have.

So basically “Web3”

No, think email in the 00s.

Part of the problem is that new markets rapidly go from "great places to invest" to "dominated by monopolies" very quickly.

For instance, people got excited about Facebook and there was a short time that funding was copious for social media startups. One Facebook figured out revenue, it got so big that nobody believed a new social media company could succeed, other than possibly getting bought out by Facebook. (Then Tik Tok came along, enabled by Facebook being banned in China.)

Back in the 1990s people thought Microsoft was so dominant that venture capitalists wouldn't fund anything that competes with Microsoft.

Tech companies are now competing for investment with bubblenomic plays such as "Web3" and

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/adam-neumann-s-new-startup-flow-...

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