6 ms·

I have a hard time seeing how that is accurate. People misjudge the timing and widespread it will be, but those next big things you mentioned are billion dollar

by uola 10y ago

I have a hard time seeing how that is accurate. People misjudge the timing and widespread it will be, but those next big things you mentioned are billion dollar industries now. WebTV -> YouTube, Netflix. VR -> Warcraft, EVE Online, Minecraft. PDAs -> iOS, Android. P2P -> Spotify, Skype, BitTorrent. Enterprise Software -> A lot, but obviously not well known, say Atlassian. Semantiv Web and APIs have largely failed, probably because of the shift to mobile. Casual games -> Rovio, Supercell, King. Microblog -> Tumblr, Instagram, Vine, Twitter. Embeddable widgets -> All the big companies. Failed dot com things -> "sharing economy" and of course earlier things like Amazon. And most of those things are still successors to other technologies that performed the same function. Most of the things happend, just as we know wearables, IoT and AI is going to happen. It's when and how that is the question. The people who hype things are always going to dominate over the people who argue the facts, at least in public forums. Look at any discussion on HN about space, self-driving cars, digital currency etc.

blowski 10y ago
You're absolutely right. "The next big thing" is a term marketing folks and journalists like to bat around because it (over) simplifies difficult concepts. The general trends have been miniturisation and ubiquitous connectivity, and they haven't just appeared in one big thing, but in every area of life.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- vonnik 10y ago
  Shrink and grow rich ;)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jhanschoo 10y ago
From my perspective, semantic web (if we are talking about the same things) failed not because of mobile, but for a variety of other reasons. When semantic web was taking off, the web was very heterogeneous, and web authors could not be expected to write proper tags. In addition, it received little support from mainstream search engines like Google, and for good reason; while the intention of semantic information was to help indexing and other agglutinative tasks, by being invisible to the user, a malicious web page might misrepresent the nature of their content.
- uola 10y ago
  My lasting (but maybe wrong) impression of the semantic web was that it was basically about interconnecting things. I think when focus shifted to mobile, where closed app store with isolated apps were the norm, that idea became less practical. But I can't say if it was because of mobile or just that the companies "grew up" and this was then reflected in not adopting the semantic web and how mobile was designed.
  - hosh 10y ago
    There is a part of the semantic web being subsumed by AIs. Viv, Alexa, and Google's and Apple's offering will be interesting as people start creating apps for those. (And as you said, timing and how widespread things get is fuzzy). Another part of semantic web that had not taken off had to do with www itself. For example, in thinking about blockchain and ipfs, it's possible to create a fully decentralized data store. But to do it well, we'd need to incorporate the semantic web ... And possibly machine learning. I don't think anyone has yet figured out how to do a fully decentralized AI yet.
    - bogomipz 10y ago
      Interesting, my probably incorrect assumptions are that the semantic web was largely 2000s era hype that didn't really take off. What are Vivs, Google and Apples semantic web offerings? I guess you are referring to the knowledge graph API from Google? Also what's an ipfs?
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > What are Vivs, Google and Apples semantic web offerings? Both Google Now and GMail/Inbox -- as well as Knowledge Graph in Google Search -- incorporate substantial functionality building on semantic web concepts. Some of them are built on Schema.org markup, which is essentially a modern, multiparty defined vocabulary semantic web markup vocabulary.
      - hosh 10y ago
        I don't think Viv is offering a semantic web offering. They are using it. Viv is a generation ahead of the current chat bot AIs, and able to deconstruct a query or a request and then construct actions. Those actions span across multiple APIs and ontologies. I'm not entirely sure how, but the Viv ontologies grows and change as Viv gets used. What would be interesting is to see how the third-party developer interfaces for Viv will look like, and whether incorporating semantic markup in data sources would make it easier to get your offering on the Viv platform. Assuming AI/MLs takes off as the next big thing (which as was asserted, it's not a certainty, but seems likely), I can see the technologies behind semantic web getting resuscitated as people try to get their offerings onto these AI platforms. IPFS is a completely decentralized store that combines a lot of older ideas in a way that hasn't been tried before. All content is content-addressable (like git), decentralized (like bittorrent), with nodes automatically discovering each other (dht), and a networking strategy that works with NATs. You can use it to publish content, and that content would be pinned or stored by the users who care about the content. One of the ways you can use IPFS is a kind of decentralized, immutable, unstructured datastore. So if you were writing an app on that, how do you make sure the data is sufficiently structured for your app? You might need to declare schemas, as well as describing a graph of how each piece of data are related to each other. Once you start trying to use IPFS as a kind of decentralized graph database, someone will probably reuse the ideas from semantic web or reinvent it.
wil421 10y ago
>VR -> Warcraft, EVE Online, Minecraft How are any of these VR? The first warcraft was released in 1994, Eve in the early 2000s and Minecraft in the 2010s. None of these use VR. Decent VR was a pipe dream in the 90s but today it will most likely become a reality. Not sure if the public will adopt it en masse.
- blowski 10y ago
  In early 2000s, there was massive hype over Second Life. While that never went mainstream, you could see it as the ancestor of today's WoW and Minecraft. I think that's what OP was talking about.
  - emddudley 10y ago
    I would point out that World of Warcraft was announced in 2001 and released in 2004. Second Life was released in 2003. I imagine that it's possible Second Life influenced the development of WoW, but I would hardly call it an ancestor.
  - philipov 10y ago
    Second Life wasn't the ancestor, so much as a dead-end descendant of a common ancestor, Ultima Online, and Meridian 59 before it. Ultima Online itself was developed to sate a demand for graphical versions of MUDs, which can be said to be the ancestor to the MMORPG genre.
    - eropple 10y ago
      I'd say that Second Life is more of a descendant of MUSH/MOO/MUX than of Ultima Online/Meridian 59.
      - elif 10y ago
        i second the UO association because of the concept of virtual real estate. In UO housing was a large aspect, regulated with an ownership system, which made the entire world nuanced and relevant. Beyond second-life, I have not seen that level of world-building in any game. Even Minecraft on a server with block area ownership is not the same, as you typically just end up with an endless landscape of art pieces, rather than a functional user-created environment.
MichaelMoser123 10y ago
i am a bit ambiguous about these cycles, its a bit like death/rebirth. Each time i get to work with a new industry: before 2002 i was doing windows stuff , After that it was Linux,networking/security. Now since 2012 its all about storage. the stupid thing is that finding a new job is harder once you are getting a bit older...
- gboss 10y ago
  Did you mean ambivalent?
- gboss 10y ago
  Did you mean ambivalent?
nsxwolf 10y ago
WebTV was just a thin client device you attached to a TV to access the web and email. It wasn't a video service. So it's probably closer to the iOS category, a device for accessing the internet that's cheaper/easier than a PC.
wpietri 10y ago
Could you say more about "WebTV -> YouTube, Netflix"? There are two things I could imagine WebTV meaning here (TVs used for Internet access; broadcast TV including more interactive elements) and both are basically the opposite of YouTube and Netflix. I'd also question the "VR->Warcraft" thing. the 90s notion of VR was about something much more like the current hype for VR, with head-mounted displays and natural human movement in imaginary spaces. Even in the 90s we had what I think of as the predecessors to WarCraft and MineCraft, which were 3D games like Doom. I also think you can't sweep timing under the rug like that. The next-big-thing phenomenon has timing as literally the first word. And that's important when talking about technology as a business. PDAs were always a niche business; it took integrating them with the cellphone to make the leap to ubiquity. But none of the PDAs made it into the promised land; Palm even had PDA+Cellphone models, but by then they were too old, too tired, too confused to seize the moment, so Apple did.
- uola 10y ago
  nsxwolf pointed out that WebTv was something I've never heard about [0]. I guess we didn't get web on the tv so much as tv on the web. I'm guessing the original purpose was to give more people access to the web and that as such is fairly solved by phones. I have a hard time being upset over "they promised us WebTv, but all we got were internet access everywhere". I think VR was both in the 90s. In large part VR was an interface to getting access to another world. A lot of it stemmed from things like neuromancer for example which isn't really natural world. It wasn't necessarily how realistic a flight simulator is. HTC Vive is quite interesting hese days with the room concept. It's hard to argue perception of the past though. I'm just saying that plenty of things that are commonplace today, like kids playing (as in the traditional sense of the word) together online, would be science fiction in the 90s. Regards to timing, I don't think it is unexpected that technology takes a few, or even many, years to live up to expectations. A smartphone is way more like a PDA than it is an early cellphone. In the end I think the most important part is just having more qualified discussions about these things. We know self-driving cars are going to be a thing and internet connected devices and digital currency, in which capacity it can, should and will be is the interesting part. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV
nostrademons 10y ago
As is often repeated around the tech industry, "Early = wrong". Knowing that mobile became a huge hit in 2010 doesn't really help the folks writing apps for NewtonScript in 1992 or Palm in 2000. WebTV was a specific Microsoft product (that was gonna be huge, it was the next information superhighway!) - it was actually a set-top box more like GoogleTV or AppleTV - and Microsoft benefitted not a bit from YouTube or Netflix's success. If you got the "casual games" part right but missed the "mobile" part, you ended up like Slide, Newgrounds, or Kongregate, all of which are in decline now, usually bought for 2x invested capital or so.
- rqebmm 10y ago
  > Knowing that mobile became a huge hit in 2010 doesn't really help the folks writing apps for NewtonScript in 1992 or Palm in 2000. Which begs the question "were predictions too early, or were early executions insufficient". There are a million examples of first movers who didn't execute. Off the top of my head Yahoo, Blackberry, and IBM OS/2 were first to market for generational techs and then lost.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Which begs the question "were predictions too early, or were early executions insufficient". Its not A or B; its A, in part because of failure to correctly anticipate B. Predicting market success is, inherently, a prediction of market participants successful execution.
    - uola 10y ago
      To succeed you often have to get in early, which means that barrier to entry will be low and competition will be extreme. Plenty of these things didn't fail because they idea failed, but because they got beaten by another company, or a simpler or more advanced technology. I think market success is a higher bar than concept or technology success. Which probably means it is more relevant for discussions (more qualified discussion are better). I said this in another thread. We know that self-driving cars are gong to be a thing in the future. That doesn't necessarily mean that the effort a company like Google makes today is going to be that valuable. It might be that when full autonomy is ready for mass implementation, we already had cars running around with (much cheaper) sensors for years. Since things like highway autonomy and active safety systems are lower hanging fruit. On the other hand if they gather enough patents and full autonomy explodes in 10 years, they have a good position. There's all this complexity yet most of HN is like "Google is the self-driving company".
dragonwriter 10y ago
> WebTV -> YouTube, Netflix. WebTV (The product that was later acquired by MS and became MSN TV, and was discontinued in 2013) is basically a forerunner of web-connected smart TV STBs. It is distinct from the newer "Web TV" (web-delivered TV-style content) like Netflix and Youtube, though WebTV's successors are a common vehicle for Web TV.

by uola 10y ago

blowski 10y ago

You're absolutely right. "The next big thing" is a term marketing folks and journalists like to bat around because it (over) simplifies difficult concepts. The general trends have been miniturisation and ubiquitous connectivity, and they haven't just appeared in one big thing, but in every area of life.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vonnik 10y ago
Shrink and grow rich ;)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jhanschoo 10y ago

From my perspective, semantic web (if we are talking about the same things) failed not because of mobile, but for a variety of other reasons. When semantic web was taking off, the web was very heterogeneous, and web authors could not be expected to write proper tags. In addition, it received little support from mainstream search engines like Google, and for good reason; while the intention of semantic information was to help indexing and other agglutinative tasks, by being invisible to the user, a malicious web page might misrepresent the nature of their content.

uola 10y ago
My lasting (but maybe wrong) impression of the semantic web was that it was basically about interconnecting things. I think when focus shifted to mobile, where closed app store with isolated apps were the norm, that idea became less practical. But I can't say if it was because of mobile or just that the companies "grew up" and this was then reflected in not adopting the semantic web and how mobile was designed.
- hosh 10y ago
  There is a part of the semantic web being subsumed by AIs. Viv, Alexa, and Google's and Apple's offering will be interesting as people start creating apps for those. (And as you said, timing and how widespread things get is fuzzy). Another part of semantic web that had not taken off had to do with www itself. For example, in thinking about blockchain and ipfs, it's possible to create a fully decentralized data store. But to do it well, we'd need to incorporate the semantic web ... And possibly machine learning. I don't think anyone has yet figured out how to do a fully decentralized AI yet.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    Interesting, my probably incorrect assumptions are that the semantic web was largely 2000s era hype that didn't really take off. What are Vivs, Google and Apples semantic web offerings? I guess you are referring to the knowledge graph API from Google? Also what's an ipfs?
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > What are Vivs, Google and Apples semantic web offerings? Both Google Now and GMail/Inbox -- as well as Knowledge Graph in Google Search -- incorporate substantial functionality building on semantic web concepts. Some of them are built on Schema.org markup, which is essentially a modern, multiparty defined vocabulary semantic web markup vocabulary.
    - hosh 10y ago
      I don't think Viv is offering a semantic web offering. They are using it. Viv is a generation ahead of the current chat bot AIs, and able to deconstruct a query or a request and then construct actions. Those actions span across multiple APIs and ontologies. I'm not entirely sure how, but the Viv ontologies grows and change as Viv gets used. What would be interesting is to see how the third-party developer interfaces for Viv will look like, and whether incorporating semantic markup in data sources would make it easier to get your offering on the Viv platform. Assuming AI/MLs takes off as the next big thing (which as was asserted, it's not a certainty, but seems likely), I can see the technologies behind semantic web getting resuscitated as people try to get their offerings onto these AI platforms. IPFS is a completely decentralized store that combines a lot of older ideas in a way that hasn't been tried before. All content is content-addressable (like git), decentralized (like bittorrent), with nodes automatically discovering each other (dht), and a networking strategy that works with NATs. You can use it to publish content, and that content would be pinned or stored by the users who care about the content. One of the ways you can use IPFS is a kind of decentralized, immutable, unstructured datastore. So if you were writing an app on that, how do you make sure the data is sufficiently structured for your app? You might need to declare schemas, as well as describing a graph of how each piece of data are related to each other. Once you start trying to use IPFS as a kind of decentralized graph database, someone will probably reuse the ideas from semantic web or reinvent it.

wil421 10y ago

>VR -> Warcraft, EVE Online, Minecraft How are any of these VR? The first warcraft was released in 1994, Eve in the early 2000s and Minecraft in the 2010s. None of these use VR. Decent VR was a pipe dream in the 90s but today it will most likely become a reality. Not sure if the public will adopt it en masse.

blowski 10y ago
In early 2000s, there was massive hype over Second Life. While that never went mainstream, you could see it as the ancestor of today's WoW and Minecraft. I think that's what OP was talking about.
- emddudley 10y ago
  I would point out that World of Warcraft was announced in 2001 and released in 2004. Second Life was released in 2003. I imagine that it's possible Second Life influenced the development of WoW, but I would hardly call it an ancestor.
- philipov 10y ago
  Second Life wasn't the ancestor, so much as a dead-end descendant of a common ancestor, Ultima Online, and Meridian 59 before it. Ultima Online itself was developed to sate a demand for graphical versions of MUDs, which can be said to be the ancestor to the MMORPG genre.
  - eropple 10y ago
    I'd say that Second Life is more of a descendant of MUSH/MOO/MUX than of Ultima Online/Meridian 59.
    - elif 10y ago
      i second the UO association because of the concept of virtual real estate. In UO housing was a large aspect, regulated with an ownership system, which made the entire world nuanced and relevant. Beyond second-life, I have not seen that level of world-building in any game. Even Minecraft on a server with block area ownership is not the same, as you typically just end up with an endless landscape of art pieces, rather than a functional user-created environment.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago

i am a bit ambiguous about these cycles, its a bit like death/rebirth. Each time i get to work with a new industry: before 2002 i was doing windows stuff , After that it was Linux,networking/security. Now since 2012 its all about storage. the stupid thing is that finding a new job is harder once you are getting a bit older...

gboss 10y ago
Did you mean ambivalent?
gboss 10y ago
Did you mean ambivalent?

nsxwolf 10y ago

WebTV was just a thin client device you attached to a TV to access the web and email. It wasn't a video service. So it's probably closer to the iOS category, a device for accessing the internet that's cheaper/easier than a PC.

wpietri 10y ago

Could you say more about "WebTV -> YouTube, Netflix"? There are two things I could imagine WebTV meaning here (TVs used for Internet access; broadcast TV including more interactive elements) and both are basically the opposite of YouTube and Netflix. I'd also question the "VR->Warcraft" thing. the 90s notion of VR was about something much more like the current hype for VR, with head-mounted displays and natural human movement in imaginary spaces. Even in the 90s we had what I think of as the predecessors to WarCraft and MineCraft, which were 3D games like Doom. I also think you can't sweep timing under the rug like that. The next-big-thing phenomenon has timing as literally the first word. And that's important when talking about technology as a business. PDAs were always a niche business; it took integrating them with the cellphone to make the leap to ubiquity. But none of the PDAs made it into the promised land; Palm even had PDA+Cellphone models, but by then they were too old, too tired, too confused to seize the moment, so Apple did.

uola 10y ago
nsxwolf pointed out that WebTv was something I've never heard about [0]. I guess we didn't get web on the tv so much as tv on the web. I'm guessing the original purpose was to give more people access to the web and that as such is fairly solved by phones. I have a hard time being upset over "they promised us WebTv, but all we got were internet access everywhere". I think VR was both in the 90s. In large part VR was an interface to getting access to another world. A lot of it stemmed from things like neuromancer for example which isn't really natural world. It wasn't necessarily how realistic a flight simulator is. HTC Vive is quite interesting hese days with the room concept. It's hard to argue perception of the past though. I'm just saying that plenty of things that are commonplace today, like kids playing (as in the traditional sense of the word) together online, would be science fiction in the 90s. Regards to timing, I don't think it is unexpected that technology takes a few, or even many, years to live up to expectations. A smartphone is way more like a PDA than it is an early cellphone. In the end I think the most important part is just having more qualified discussions about these things. We know self-driving cars are going to be a thing and internet connected devices and digital currency, in which capacity it can, should and will be is the interesting part. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV

nostrademons 10y ago

As is often repeated around the tech industry, "Early = wrong". Knowing that mobile became a huge hit in 2010 doesn't really help the folks writing apps for NewtonScript in 1992 or Palm in 2000. WebTV was a specific Microsoft product (that was gonna be huge, it was the next information superhighway!) - it was actually a set-top box more like GoogleTV or AppleTV - and Microsoft benefitted not a bit from YouTube or Netflix's success. If you got the "casual games" part right but missed the "mobile" part, you ended up like Slide, Newgrounds, or Kongregate, all of which are in decline now, usually bought for 2x invested capital or so.

rqebmm 10y ago
> Knowing that mobile became a huge hit in 2010 doesn't really help the folks writing apps for NewtonScript in 1992 or Palm in 2000. Which begs the question "were predictions too early, or were early executions insufficient". There are a million examples of first movers who didn't execute. Off the top of my head Yahoo, Blackberry, and IBM OS/2 were first to market for generational techs and then lost.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Which begs the question "were predictions too early, or were early executions insufficient". Its not A or B; its A, in part because of failure to correctly anticipate B. Predicting market success is, inherently, a prediction of market participants successful execution.
  - uola 10y ago
    To succeed you often have to get in early, which means that barrier to entry will be low and competition will be extreme. Plenty of these things didn't fail because they idea failed, but because they got beaten by another company, or a simpler or more advanced technology. I think market success is a higher bar than concept or technology success. Which probably means it is more relevant for discussions (more qualified discussion are better). I said this in another thread. We know that self-driving cars are gong to be a thing in the future. That doesn't necessarily mean that the effort a company like Google makes today is going to be that valuable. It might be that when full autonomy is ready for mass implementation, we already had cars running around with (much cheaper) sensors for years. Since things like highway autonomy and active safety systems are lower hanging fruit. On the other hand if they gather enough patents and full autonomy explodes in 10 years, they have a good position. There's all this complexity yet most of HN is like "Google is the self-driving company".

dragonwriter 10y ago

> WebTV -> YouTube, Netflix. WebTV (The product that was later acquired by MS and became MSN TV, and was discontinued in 2013) is basically a forerunner of web-connected smart TV STBs. It is distinct from the newer "Web TV" (web-delivered TV-style content) like Netflix and Youtube, though WebTV's successors are a common vehicle for Web TV.