>I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw app

>I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw applications at it. I like this lens, although I'd stop short of saying it's "most" technology revolutions. Rather, it's a counterweight to the common perspective that revolutions are made of radical novelty; the reality is that both forces are important. My favorite example of this is the home computer. When they came out, they barely did anything; in a world where a "computer" already meant (in some cases) a nice Unix system with editors and compilers and preemptive multitasking and all the sorts of things we still take for granted, they were more like Arduinos. Absolute rubbish. And yet, university researchers abandoned their mainframes in droves to do their data processing on silly little home PCs. Why? Because crappy though they were, they represented freedom. You didn't have to plead to be allowed time on one, or worse hand over your batch FORTRAN program on a giant stack of punched cards (don't drop them) to some overworked secretary in "data processing" and wait a whole business day to get your printout of "error on line 5". Buy a microcomputer, and your allocated time was 24h/day, and your data turnaround was instant. You could even write your thesis on one - bye bye typewriter! Worse (i.e. cheaper) is better.