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As others have also mentioned, the biggest sin the show commits is having the main characters invent so much. It's certainly not unknown for a person or a group

As others have also mentioned, the biggest sin the show commits is having the main characters invent so much. It's certainly not unknown for a person or a group that innovate in multiple fields but for them to innovate in so many was a bit of a stretch but one that was acceptable for storytelling purposes. An alternate could have been to fade characters in and out over the seasons. Joe and Gordon are the stars of the PC-clone season, with Cameron and Donna playing supporting roles. In the Online Services season, Cameron and Donna step forward while Joe and Gordon become secondary characters and characters such as Yo-Yo and Tom increase their presence. Season three could have had Cameron and Donna fall back to secondary characters while Yo-Yo and Tom became the main characters in creating a what would essentially be something like Sierra Online or Electronic Arts. Each season could have introduced a new period of tech and introduced new minor characters that would be the center of the next season. For continuity, the common thread in all of the companies could have been Boz, moving from company to company in a sales and business development role. This way the show could have continued on though to present day and even taken a branch here and there during periods of higher than typical innovation. The big downside is that you end up rotating out some very talented actors. All of the main cast of the show as filmed were really good and it would have been a shame to lose that but the storytelling would have been better for it.

deleted 6y ago
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itsoktocry 6y ago
Your approach might work for the tech-oriented audience members, but the character development and ongoing drama is what makes the show appealing to people who don't care about the tech. It's part of what makes the show brilliant.
prepend 6y ago
The way I look at it is that tech frequently has people inventing the same approach over and over. So this actually happens, just it’s not always the version that takes off. Sometimes I shrug when someone says “I invented Facebook in 1990.” But sometimes that happens, although people don’t normally talk about it in public. I’ve worked with co-workers who “invented” aspect oriented programming, Jenkins, ajax, nosql sui generis. A few years later in each case I remember thinking “oh yeah this is what John Doe” was building. So I just chalked this up to people in this company “inventing” mobile computers, dial-up communities, and portals at the same time as compaq, prodigy, and yahoo.
- vidarh 6y ago
  I think that makes sense. This is a story about people who are reasonably successful but they keep never making it truly big. If anything, having a big breakout success is so rare that "almost succeeding" many times is a lot more common. It sucks - e.g. I was part of building a tablet years before the iPad (we were not first, either, and not the last pre-Apple attempt) - but after a couple like that you get used to it and learn from what the successful attempt did different instead of being annoyed at it. And then you try again with something else.
  - sgerenser 6y ago
    Arguably, Apple also built a tablet years before the iPad: the Newton MessagePad in 1993.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      There were a lot of similar pen-based PDAs and tablet PCs released around the same time as the Newton. Though I think all of them were as commercially unsuccessful as the Newton. E.g. the Amstrad PenPad. The Newton was not really something people compared to, though - it got compared more to PalmPilot and similar PDAs. It makes sense to put it in the mix of precursors, by all means, but at the time people didn't really draw that parallel. The "second generation" tablets were very much treated as a separate category from Newton, PalmPilot, PenPad etc. on one hand, and Tablet PCs on the other hand, in that they tended to be built around internet connectivity and browsers as more important even that portability (you were expected to use them around home or the office), and with media consumption as an essential element. The marketing assumption was that people would have a PDA for work, and tablets would be media devices that were largely separate things. The second generation devices, including ours, and Ericssons, and a number of others, flawed in that they were still too low res (though much better than the "first generation" like the PenPad or Newton), too expensive, and too slow to be attractive for anything but techie early adopters, and with abysmal battery lifetime which meant they couldn't compete with the PDAs, and you were basically chained to home. This was also before wifi was widespread, and various alternatives were still competing for the wireless space - e.g. ours had a data extension to DECT. Apple's greatest stroke of genius with respect to the iPhone and iPad wasn't primarily technical, but to recognise that it was too early and the hardware wasn't up to it, and wait instead of releasing a sub-par product. "Everyone else" launched tablets as the next step after PDAs around '99-'05 or so, didn't get any traction, and gave up or failed and then a lot of us subsequently laughed at Apple, because "everyone knew" something like the iPhone even wouldn't work. That's not to say I assume we'd have competed if we'd waited, but we'd at least had a much better shot. There was a very distinct failure to understand the gap between the quality that was exciting to a tech audience vs. what would be exciting to a wider market... That was a very useful lesson.
bishnu 6y ago
I don't think it is. Most popular, groundbreaking technology isn't the first version of itself. Eg, I think of this profile of Tony West: https://www.wired.com/2000/12/soul/ https://www.wired.com/2000/12/soul/ Tony West is the protagonist of The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, the account of Data General creating a new microcomputer in the 80s. The first season of H&CF borrows heavily from it. He was ahead of the curve on a lot of things - laser printers, computers, laptops, thin clients...but never had the ability to bring it all to market in a meaningful way. The tech industry is full of people like this - people that can build the future but not sell it. I didn't find it unrealistic.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

itsoktocry 6y ago

Your approach might work for the tech-oriented audience members, but the character development and ongoing drama is what makes the show appealing to people who don't care about the tech. It's part of what makes the show brilliant.

prepend 6y ago

The way I look at it is that tech frequently has people inventing the same approach over and over. So this actually happens, just it’s not always the version that takes off. Sometimes I shrug when someone says “I invented Facebook in 1990.” But sometimes that happens, although people don’t normally talk about it in public. I’ve worked with co-workers who “invented” aspect oriented programming, Jenkins, ajax, nosql sui generis. A few years later in each case I remember thinking “oh yeah this is what John Doe” was building. So I just chalked this up to people in this company “inventing” mobile computers, dial-up communities, and portals at the same time as compaq, prodigy, and yahoo.

vidarh 6y ago
I think that makes sense. This is a story about people who are reasonably successful but they keep never making it truly big. If anything, having a big breakout success is so rare that "almost succeeding" many times is a lot more common. It sucks - e.g. I was part of building a tablet years before the iPad (we were not first, either, and not the last pre-Apple attempt) - but after a couple like that you get used to it and learn from what the successful attempt did different instead of being annoyed at it. And then you try again with something else.
- sgerenser 6y ago
  Arguably, Apple also built a tablet years before the iPad: the Newton MessagePad in 1993.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    There were a lot of similar pen-based PDAs and tablet PCs released around the same time as the Newton. Though I think all of them were as commercially unsuccessful as the Newton. E.g. the Amstrad PenPad. The Newton was not really something people compared to, though - it got compared more to PalmPilot and similar PDAs. It makes sense to put it in the mix of precursors, by all means, but at the time people didn't really draw that parallel. The "second generation" tablets were very much treated as a separate category from Newton, PalmPilot, PenPad etc. on one hand, and Tablet PCs on the other hand, in that they tended to be built around internet connectivity and browsers as more important even that portability (you were expected to use them around home or the office), and with media consumption as an essential element. The marketing assumption was that people would have a PDA for work, and tablets would be media devices that were largely separate things. The second generation devices, including ours, and Ericssons, and a number of others, flawed in that they were still too low res (though much better than the "first generation" like the PenPad or Newton), too expensive, and too slow to be attractive for anything but techie early adopters, and with abysmal battery lifetime which meant they couldn't compete with the PDAs, and you were basically chained to home. This was also before wifi was widespread, and various alternatives were still competing for the wireless space - e.g. ours had a data extension to DECT. Apple's greatest stroke of genius with respect to the iPhone and iPad wasn't primarily technical, but to recognise that it was too early and the hardware wasn't up to it, and wait instead of releasing a sub-par product. "Everyone else" launched tablets as the next step after PDAs around '99-'05 or so, didn't get any traction, and gave up or failed and then a lot of us subsequently laughed at Apple, because "everyone knew" something like the iPhone even wouldn't work. That's not to say I assume we'd have competed if we'd waited, but we'd at least had a much better shot. There was a very distinct failure to understand the gap between the quality that was exciting to a tech audience vs. what would be exciting to a wider market... That was a very useful lesson.

bishnu 6y ago

I don't think it is. Most popular, groundbreaking technology isn't the first version of itself. Eg, I think of this profile of Tony West: https://www.wired.com/2000/12/soul/ https://www.wired.com/2000/12/soul/ Tony West is the protagonist of The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, the account of Data General creating a new microcomputer in the 80s. The first season of H&CF borrows heavily from it. He was ahead of the curve on a lot of things - laser printers, computers, laptops, thin clients...but never had the ability to bring it all to market in a meaningful way. The tech industry is full of people like this - people that can build the future but not sell it. I didn't find it unrealistic.