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I really like this point. It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect mone

I really like this point. It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes". But bigger inventions don't solve a small, narrowly-defined problem: they totally change the game. You can't sum up the impact of the automobile, antiseptic or the internet in a sentence, because these inventions caused a cascade of other inventions that solve other problems. Cars weren't released out of the blue by a well-funded startup as a half-baked MVP, they were built off of advances in industrial metallurgy, the invention of the engine, engineering used in trains and boats. Similarly, the internet didn't just happen - people first figured out electrical engineering, circuit boards, GUI's, COBOL and C++ and a myriad of other languages that made it possible to invent the internet. I'm not saying that this online bank thingie is on that level yet. But for me, these kind of inventions are indicative of the death of institutional finance. The first step in destroying global finance as an institution is to whittle away at where the banks can make profit. Apps like Robin Hood have already helped to decentralize knowledge and participation in the stock market. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have shown at least a proof of concept that you don't need central banks to have currency. Money transfer apps like TransferWise eliminate currency conversion profiteering. Now what happens when you make a front-end that can wire all of these ideas together? A cashless society? Maybe.

jamesrcole 9y ago
> It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes". I would also say that if you'd told people about those problems thirty years ago, people might have responded 'but I can already communicate with my team using a conference call' and 'I can already sell items through the classified or flea market'. 'What new problems are these things solving?' I think that most inventions don't do anything particularly new - the kinds of individual tasks you can do with them could have been done before. What they tend to do is provide greater efficiency. And greater efficiency at scale enables new kinds of things to happen. E.g. think of youtube. It was possible for people to share videos before the internet. E.g. you could have submitted a description of your video to a printed catalogue, and if people wanted to watch it they'd contact you via the catalogue, so you could send them a copy on VHS. What youtube and the internet does is makes it so much easier -- so much more efficient -- that it makes it practical, and the scale enables all sorts of new things to crop up on top of it.
- hasbroslasher 9y ago
  Generally people think something's "broken" when they commission an app like Slack - whether it's UX, speed, price point, poor efficiency broadly... I mean, hell, what new inventions aren't done in the name of efficiency? It's a motivating factor for almost everything people in business do. As such, this seems like splitting hairs to me.
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    A very common criticism of new things is that they don't do anything new. I'm saying that "mere efficiency improvements" matter more than is commonly thought by people encountering something new.
    - hasbroslasher 9y ago
      Hmm. I'll need to think about this one. I can see what you're saying... It's probably true but it definitely messes with my (and everyone's) tendency to see history as a series of monolithic happenings.

jamesrcole 9y ago

> It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes". I would also say that if you'd told people about those problems thirty years ago, people might have responded 'but I can already communicate with my team using a conference call' and 'I can already sell items through the classified or flea market'. 'What new problems are these things solving?' I think that most inventions don't do anything particularly new - the kinds of individual tasks you can do with them could have been done before. What they tend to do is provide greater efficiency. And greater efficiency at scale enables new kinds of things to happen. E.g. think of youtube. It was possible for people to share videos before the internet. E.g. you could have submitted a description of your video to a printed catalogue, and if people wanted to watch it they'd contact you via the catalogue, so you could send them a copy on VHS. What youtube and the internet does is makes it so much easier -- so much more efficient -- that it makes it practical, and the scale enables all sorts of new things to crop up on top of it.

hasbroslasher 9y ago
Generally people think something's "broken" when they commission an app like Slack - whether it's UX, speed, price point, poor efficiency broadly... I mean, hell, what new inventions aren't done in the name of efficiency? It's a motivating factor for almost everything people in business do. As such, this seems like splitting hairs to me.
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  A very common criticism of new things is that they don't do anything new. I'm saying that "mere efficiency improvements" matter more than is commonly thought by people encountering something new.
  - hasbroslasher 9y ago
    Hmm. I'll need to think about this one. I can see what you're saying... It's probably true but it definitely messes with my (and everyone's) tendency to see history as a series of monolithic happenings.