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> No viable entrepreneurial venture can succeed solely on the basis of what it is logically possible for the technology to someday do, or what it could, in principle, in theory, one day.

I think the real trick here is to learn how to distinguish between objections that are just examples of people not getting it, and objections that really do point up a fundamental problem you will have to overcome or find a way around in order to succeed. This can be trickier than it sounds.

A common mistake advocates for new technologies make is to fall in love with their new toy and dismiss any skepticism of its prospects as examples of cluelessness -- often with glib responses like the one in the OP, "don't hate, create" (ugh). Not everyone who comes to you with a critique is a "hater." Some of them are coming to you because they have learned something through hard experience that they think will be helpful to you. Ignoring those people can lead you to walk right into the same well-hidden minefields that have blown up countless other bold explorers over the years. So there's value in learning how to spot the one guy in the crowd of people telling you to watch where you step who's sporting a peg leg.

Indeed. Also, about "haters":

It'd be nice if the tech startup community looked like the OP imagines it, with innovative companies boldly challenging ingrained assumptions and disrupting conventional wisdom with forward-thinking solutions to hard problems worth solving.

I think a lot of the "hating" is directed at the latest pump-and-dump social plugin or other VC-funded sausage party. The lack of mood emoticons on Twitter is not a problem worth solving, and failure to see its utility is not for a paucity of vision or ambition.

It seems to me (an outsider looking at the Bay Area culture) that people create what the VC's will invest in. In a way the VC companies are the first customers they focus on. If VC's stop funding 90% of their portfolio useless social websites and instead focus on robotics, green tech, medical tech etc. I would argue that most new startups will start working on meaningful products.

I like your initial point about technology needing an implementation. I see this with things like the Leap Motion controller where I think it's an interesting product, but I have no idea why I need/would benefit from one. Then I compare that with things like the Chromecast that solves a problem for my parents/girlfriend who are tech-savvy enough to track down their media online but they don't want to deal with an HTPC/Boxee/Google TV. It didn't take more than a few seconds before I could imagine them using it daily.

Also, "VC-funded sausage party" is a great phrase. Pokes fun at brogramming while hinting at the gender-imbalance. +1

It's a fine line.

There's a world of difference between skeptics and haters, with the latter not deserving comments.

Some skepticism may be indeed healthy and comes naturally with experience. But it's also easy (particularly for the curious and well educated types, like the HN crowd) to become overly skeptic and jaded with time.

The problem with skeptics is that they tend to default to "yeah, saw that before", which makes you more conservative and ready to shut down others' ideas y. That's why innovation is often associated with people with limited experience in the field, as the Steve Jobs no-people-with-phone-experience-on-the-iPhone-team story above.

The hard part (for me, at least) is to always balance a healthy dose of skepticism, and still think outside the conventional way, and keep a can-do attitude.

This is a good nuanced response, recognizing the complexity of what the post is broadly criticizing: the quality evaluation of ideas.

You cannot shoot down the (positive or negative) evaluation of all ideas as "hating," for that would be incorrect. Ideas may be evaluated independently, and some people are quite good at it.

With that accepted, the argument for what types of evaluations are valid must become more complex and again, nuanced. This blog post does not achieve that, instead trying to argue for the rather extreme position that all negative evaluation is disadvantageous to everyone.

It just ain't true.

So, yes, as anyone with half a brain knows, jaded "hating" and constant skepticism are poor excuses for intelligent evaluation. Even knowing that, the extreme emotional responses to any idea always get the most attention, and are often amplified out of proportion. A balanced measured evaluation is rarely noteworthy, even if it's right, so it may seem as though the startup community or workplace trends toward the negative. The psychology of crowd mentality is the fascinating angle here, not the end result. Find the source of the problem and change the systems which motivate this sort of behavior and we might have a chance.

You're totally right though: as with most worthy pursuits, the extremes are easy pits to fall into, but the balance is both correct and difficult.

From the perspective of the advice-giver you can still choose how to phrase your hard-learned lessons though.

Over the past few years I've learned to never try to shoot down someone's passion.

At most I'll acknowledge that what they're trying to do is going to be difficult, but the brunt of my communication will be focused on what I believe will give them the best shot at achieving their objective.

Unless they're betting the house, bank or their marriage on a truly hare-brained scheme of course.

Think about any big project you've been a part of. With the benefit of hindsight, is it not true to say that you might well not have taken them on in the first place if you'd known what would be involved?

"3) In the heyday of the telegraph era, deploying lines was an extremely expensive and capital-intensive process, and it wasn't until other technological advancements that made possible various multiplexing and aggregation schemes (frequency-division, and later digital TDM) came along that the idea of running a copper line into every home really got to be realistic[1]. I agree that Western Union was a bit shortsighted in turning down this patent, but one could hardly blame them for thinking that universal telephone service wasn't economically possible. That's like selling a business idea today that relies on everyone having a 10 terabit fiber cable run to their home. Yeah, it's possible, and I have no doubt someone will make fun of me in a decade or two for naysaying it in any way, but would you invest $2bn in a related patent today?"

I disagree - Multiplexing didn't play a significant role in the local loop until the 1980's. There were multiplexing techniques for toll lines prior to the paper you cite - look up phantom circuits. [1]

If you want to check out about what drove the creation of the telephone network check out "Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System" [2], its a great book on how local toll traffic (among other things) drove the creation of the telephone network.

Western Union didn't see the future in the telephone network because it disagreed with its existing model - wich is to say office to office messages - also their network was multiplexed from very early, telephones for practical reasons couldn't be until the invention of the vacuum tube.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_circuit

[2] http://surface.syr.edu/books/18/

I was given to understand that primitive multiplexing of interoffice trunks was quite essential to proliferation of universal service. But I'll definitely take the book recommendation, thanks!

It was important to the establishment of a practical (and cheap) toll network - but not local service.

Both seem to be cases suffering from a horizon problem.

In Airy's case, the benefits of the Analytical Engine may not have been realizable in the area extending to the horizon of his ability to make recommendations. Had he been making recommendations with a 100-150 year timeframe, perhaps he might have been more generous.

The telephone case is more damnable, and reads like a combination of a short horizon for ROI combined with Innovator's Dilemma.

A lot of pragmatic negativity is simply evaluators making very rational recommendations based on a time horizon in which they are both technically correct and for which they are given incentive to be correct. Extend the horizon (stretch the time) or change the incentive (change it from spending today's cash flow to an investment for the long term) and the evaluations may change as well.

"The telephone case is more damnable, and reads like a combination of a short horizon for ROI combined with Innovator's Dilemma."

I think it was a bit simpler than that. I really don't think they understood how much more enabling voice[1] was over morse code. It really seems like they didn't get the model would change via voice because you didn't need the morse code operators.

1) they mentioned voice quality in the report and it sounds like they weren't willing to be fix it as part of a NIH mentality

That is fascinating, and kind of a twist on Innovator's Dilemma. It would be innovator's dilemma IF they saw voice as inferior to telegraphy, for instance, if quality and quantity of information transfer were seen as lower, and less accurate than morse code. Perhaps they mistook the fact that Morse code messages were pre-written and could be transferred quickly, while spoken messages were more stilted, and conveyed less info per time unit.

Is it not reasonable to suppose that it was an idea before its time, and useless in the particular historical context and implementational form in which it appeared?

Oh, but it would have been very useful! Recall that one of the first uses of mechanical calculators was to produce tables for aiming artillery. They certainly had artillery in 1830! And precision aiming would surely have been valuable.

Other uses are likely as well -- astronomical calculations for navigation, perhaps; tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions, which were already being produced by hand; probably more.

Maybe in 1500 it wouldn't have been so useful, but by 1800 I'm quite certain it would have been very useful indeed.

The point is this, person who built the first brick never realized Pyramids could be built using them.