Hacker News Reader

> the young generation ... are the biggest indicator as to where things are heading.

They sure can be. But young people around me in the early 2000s were into rap-metal, buying ringtones, and using ICQ or IM. These obviously were not great indicators of what would happen in the near future.

View on HN

Those were great indicators! Rap-metal was the weird transition between rock/metal being ascendent in the 90s to the complete takeover by hip hop. Ringtones were people paying money to customize their mobile experience, they were early apps and appstore. ICQ and IM were telling us that text based instant messaging was take a lot of share from email and phone calls both.

Of course, this is easy in retrospect, I couldn't have forecast it correctly at the time!

Hey, ICQ was great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com