The Internet Is As Dead And Boring As You Want It To Be | Hacker News Reader

The Internet Is As Dead And Boring As You Want It To Be

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18 pointsdanielha13 comments

I kind of agree with Mark Cuban. Sure, there are a bunch of new services on the web, but anyone could predict this linear growth in innovation. The thing is, we are not seeing the exponential growth in mindshare and adoption that we saw in the 90's. We are still using the same or similar standards that we used in the 90's as well. When the internet started to gain interest, it was mind blowing. It simply isn't anymore. More bandwidth could allow us to deliver deeper innovations. Imagine if Gigabit connections were the norm. We could bring massively parallel grid computing to consumers. Just imagine encoding H.264 in seconds instead of hours. Right now we are in a stalemate with the telcos.

I hate how the Internet is US-centric. There are many other countries that are more progressive and have insanely fast Internet connection speeds such as Sweden, Japan, Korea, etc. It's only in the US (and Canada) that the telcos are allowed to be complete assholes towards customers.

Let's get real. Unless you're going for the asian markets, those other countries really don't matter.

Why don't they matter?

Getting real means they matter.

Getting real means lets see some numbers.

I hate sourging for sources, and it seems obvious enough, but fair point. This is from a quick google.

I'll talk regarding the Asian market, which is far from saturated (this I'm not going to go compile more research on, so challenge me if you will)

http://www.blogherald.com/2005/05/25/world-wide-blog-count-f... Old, but if this is good, 15M blogs in South Korea is quite a large market.

http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/06/27/yahoo-japan-more-page... Recent, but here again I will go uncited: Yahoo dies against Google in USA, but in Asia they have been king. Yahoo is plenty real, and Asia matters to them, a lot.

You might be fine with the North American market. It's hella big. But if you have an entry point into Asia and don't use it, that's wasted potential, because cloning works on an international scale. http://mashable.com/2007/08/19/doktus/

What's so real about the internet is that it's zero distance from anywhere around the globe, and only a relatively small number of companies exploit this fully. If more companies did, Mark Cuban wouldn't be complaining about it being boring today.

Are you blind? I said except for asian markets.

Woops! You got me. I got carried away. I'll only admit being half blind though, because I'm willing to bet that "emerging markets" will eventually visit the same cycles of soft development that are taking TechCrunch headlines now. Brazil is not a question. Vietnam/Thailand... ok that's SE Asian.

Turkey is a possibility. A little west of India are others. East European countries like Slovenia. Alright, maybe the effects aren't immediate enough to be obvious like South Korea, but new markets will appear and you might just want to do something about it if you have the chance.

I guess I failed to back myself, oh well. I don't need to change your opinion though. Whatever works.

I cannot dispute that "eventually" many things will happen:)

I agree to a certain extent. I don't expect to see any mind-blowing innovations on the Internet until bandwidth constraints dissipate, but that definitely doesn't mean it's dead.

Think about the automobile. Fundamentally, it hasn't changed since the Model T. However, there have been many incremental improvements that have made a significant impact on our lives (A/C, seat belts, power-steering/brakes, GPS, auto-parking).

In about 20 years, the technology they're working on right now at Stanford for the DARPA Challenge will be commercialized and cars will drive themselves. That will be mind-blowing.

Hopefully we'll see something game-changing on the net sooner rather than later.

> But even more importantly, the web is primarily a communications platform, not a broadcasting or publishing platform, those are secondary uses.

Except he's wrong on this. File sharing has always been an extremely popular use for the web. Most of the social networking platforms allow you to publish to a large audience of people you don't really know. Facebook does this to a lesser extent, but that's why it's not #1.

This is the same type of "dead" as when Paul Graham said Microsoft is dead. Of course they aren't literally dead. They're still profitable. But they aren't leading in innovations and they never will again. Similarly, the internet is dead because many breakthrough technologies will require exponentially more bandwidth.

PG calling Microsoft dead worked better because all it takes for the internet to become undead (alive?) is fiber to many homes.

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