3 ms·

> 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 "w

by 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".

3 ms·

> 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 "w

by rqebmm 10y ago

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".