23 ms·

“A solution in search of a problem” is a low-rates phenomenon

113 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

malfist 4y ago
I thought this article had a good rule on how to differentiate dead end "solution in search of a problem" inventions and ones that might be successful. > whether the technology does something that would be useful if everyone had it, but is relatively useless at small scale I've often told my partner a lot of his "smart home" devices are solutions in search of problems. It seems to ride this line. Probably why despite my protests we keep winding up with more and I have to yell at alexa more frequently
- sokoloff 4y ago
  What about smart home devices would be useful if everyone had them but useless if only at your house? (I’m a tinkerer but still reluctant to deploy most smart home solutions because they usually fail the household acceptance factor.)
  - pornel 4y ago
    Mesh networks, maybe? I like smart homes in principle, but the current implementations are awful. I end up sitting in the dark because software on my lightbulbs locks up, and a robot tells me "Sorry, I can't find 'lights on dammit' in your music library".
  - ulrikrasmussen 4y ago
    I think it's a false dichotomy. Supposedly the GP thinks that their smart home devices are already useful, so there is no need to consider whether they would be more useful if more people had them. I think the quote from the article is a bit strange, and the example of clocks is not very good because people still had a way to tell time before clocks were invented (e.g. looking at the sun), it was just not very precise. A clock is still useful for a single person because that person now has a faster and more reliable way of telling the time without having to look out the window.
    - pm215 4y ago
      Yes, but it's not as useful as it is to a modern person, because if you're the only person who owns a clock then your life will have very few situations where knowing the time exactly and reliably matters -- so you only own one if you have some specific use-case where you care about exact time. The benefit of owning a precise and accurate clock becomes much greater if you are frequently interacting with other people who also have precise and accurate clocks (such as operators of railways), and at the point where most people in a society have an accurate clock then it becomes a default assumption that scheduling can be done by time and you will find it increasingly difficult to be without one. (I think the smartphone is currently going through a similar transition -- right now it is definitely still possible to live without a smartphone, but an increasing number of organizations are now starting to act on the assumption that every person they deal with does have one.)
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      I think the point of the analogy is that a clock isn't very useful for an individual, unless enough other people around you also have one. You don't gain much from being able to accurately tell the time down to minutes or seconds, because by far the biggest non-specialist use of clocks is synchronizing with other people. You'll come by the store at 08:00 sharp, and discover it's closed, because the day is cloudy and the storeowner's rooster overslept, so he still thinks it's early. Such fundamental technologies have also a perverse tipping point, a kind of strong network effect in disguise. Continuing with the analogy, once enough people have clocks and start coordinating with them, they'll start forcing their preference on others, and soon enough everyone has to get a clock, or else they won't be able to synchronize with the society around them. With timekeeping, this arguably happened before most of us were alive. But a more recent example, one that's being regularly lamented in bars and in press, is cellphones (and even more recently, smartphones): they went from a rich people's toy to being ubiquitous in ~decade, and these days there's a strong social expectation that you own one, and that through it, you're accessible during waking hours. People slightly older than I am call it an invisible chain/tether. Our children will probably call it "normal", just like my generation considers clocks normal.
  - malfist 4y ago
    I think there's a lot to be said about smart home devices and accessibility. I could imagine voice assistants controlling devices for those with vision impairments or mobility impairments would be a huge boon.
- adriancr 4y ago
  > I've often told my partner a lot of his "smart home" devices are solutions in search of problems "smart home" things are usually hobbies at small scale, and you never know if something ends up being useful/useless until you actually try it out
- jchw 4y ago
  I love smart home stuff, but greatly prefer open source compatible (Home Assistant etc), non-internet-connected smart home equipment that still has hardware switches. There's no good standard for RGBW addressability over wires here in the U.S. (that I'm aware of) so I do use some Philips Hue bulbs, but only accompanied by a hard-wired switch capable of associating directly with the bulb, so that all it needs to work is power. I will admit though that I still mostly just do it because it's fun. But hey, it's fun that comes in handy, too.
  - makestuff 4y ago
    Yeah if someone came out with a piece of hardware that could run the an NLP model to detect the common phrases (turn lights on/off, play music, etc.) and then have it prepackaged with home assistant it would ruin a lot of these cloud connected devices.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    System like X10 or power line Ethernet that communicate over power lines have huge transformers and I think high power consumption. You’d think you could have power line Ethernet in your PC or X10 bulbs but it is not so practical.
    - jchw 4y ago
      Yeah, powerline data transmission seems impractical. It works, but reliability has always been a huge problem for me, even with the most expensive adapters. Now that I own instead of rent, I just run ethernet for my computers. For smart home, I don't really care for throwing RF at every single problem, but ZigBee and Zwave at least do work, so I am just doing that for now. What would be cool is just having something simple, like maybe one or two wire serial, at least between the switches and bulbs. Today, the best solution I'm aware of for smart bulbs is something like Inovelli Blue Series or Embrighten switches, which can associate with the bulbs directly. Even though in smart bulb it must use RF, it can at least skip the hub and work when everything else is down. (Though, I am a little disappointed that I had to bypass the power control for my Blue Series. I was hoping I could have it connected to measure power usage even in smart bulb mode, but it seems even in smart bulb mode where the power is passthru you still can't have an inductive load like a ceiling fan motor or it will cause problems. Bummer.)
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  My smart home gadgets are a common source of controversy in my house. I have some rooms with dimmable lights that work really well even if there is some latency. I have other ones where there are chronic reliability problems usually because I tried to get a Sengled switch to work a Hue light or something like that. I’d say my project success rate has been about 50%. Hue made a really great switch which is piezoelectric powered and doesn’t need a battery but these are now crazy expensive and hard to find. I think switches are affected by supply chain issues but might not be stocked at places like Best Guy because plenty of people seem to have a smartphone grafted to them and just use the phone as a switch.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  I'm baffled at what purpose there is to voice-activated lights. Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. If I'm entering or exiting a room, I turn the light on or off as I pass the switch. This is going to be much faster than "Alexa, turn the computer room lights off" on my way out and then waiting to make sure it understood me. The only exception is my front porch light. I usually leave it off, but turn it on when I'm expecting a food delivery at night. Being able to turn it on from my computer room remotely could be nice, but I'm not going to begin investing into a "smart home" for that one purpose. My TV and clothes washer are both "smart", but I don't use any of the smart features, and neither have ever been connected to my WiFi. The only smart appliance I have is a thermostat, and even that one is pretty basic. It has an app that I can use to control it and create a schedule, but it doesn't try to learn when people are home.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I think a lot of this comes back to the way everyone has been focused on building huge mainstream businesses for a long time. Many IoT devices are useful to many people but not at the scale companies like Amazon or Google want — people with vision or mobility impairments, for example, find voice control far more useful than other people but that isn’t a huge market and many of them are low income. Parents with babies probably use voice controls more than they used to but that only lasts so long and then becomes a problem until they protect the ability to have Alexa order more LEGO sets - and not anything people are jumping to subscribe to. There could probably be a medium-sized business model which works but not the kind of hyper-scale vision that SV has favored. Apple seems to have the best balance putting the smarts in devices you were already buying for other reasons, and being able to concentrate more than one promotion cycle out which Google struggles with.
  - __derek__ 4y ago
    > Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. Not necessarily. Open layouts have taken the office and residential markets by storm over the last two decades. Many "rooms" don't have well-defined boundaries, so it's common not to have a switch everywhere someone might enter.
  - malfist 4y ago
black_puppydog 4y ago
> [...] products that ultimately turned out to be dead ends, like the Palm Pilot [...] Huh? I never had a Pilot, but from everything I've read about it (and how people who did have one describe it) it was quite amazing, and arguably the predecessor of the smartphone, no? I get that the product line is dead, but the concept was very much viable...
- anthonybsd 4y ago
  Palm Pilot was a huge success both from a sales perspective and from "getting consumers comfortable with touch screen" perspective. The author of the article has a very poor choice of metaphors and examples which really obscures his point.
- electroly 4y ago
  I had several Palm devices. As I recall there was a fairly long gap between the death of PDAs and the birth of smartphones. I certainly did not replace my Palm with a smartphone; I replaced it with nothing, and then years later I got a smartphone. Most of the things that are amazing about smartphones were not present on my Palm IIIe, FWIW.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Are you sure? You might have replaced it with a smaller, lighter, more-powerful laptop that you could more easily use on the train or a flight, and a Blackberry phone that had a lot of Palm features built into it (minus the screen and stylus of course).
  - michaelhoffman 4y ago
    If we're trading anecdotes, I certainly replaced my Palm with a smartphone. In fact, my first smartphone was a Palm. Anyway, I don't think the Palm Pilot was a dead end. It's hard to see it not influencing Blackberries and smartphones.
  - ipsi 4y ago
    > there was a fairly long gap between the death of PDAs and the birth of smartphones. Only if you define the birth of smartphones as starting with Android/iPhone. Palm released their own smartphones using the same OS as their PDAs (the Treo line) prior to that, and Microsoft had Windows Mobile plus a bundle of third-party manufacturers. Plus Blackberry had been around the whole time, too. Looking it up, it seems that Palm Tungsten TX[1] was produced in 2005, 1.5-2 years after they started producing the Treo 600[2], which was one of the first smartphones - yes, it was inferior to the iPhone in a number of ways, but having owned a Treo 680, in my mind it still qualifies as a smartphone. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_TX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_TX [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_600 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_600
javier123454321 4y ago
Above the fold, self promotion... below the fold, a popup to sign up without reading it. I can't be bothered to click out. I can be bothered however to write this comment to complain to the state of the SEOfication of all content. Maybe it's good, but I'm immediately skeptical.
jameshart 4y ago
I think the point being made here is that when a solution has found its problem, exploitation of that solution drives up rates, because rolling out the solution is an ‘easy money’ investment. Seems reasonable. I can buy that connection. The motor vehicle example makes sense. Of course you then have to hold that theory up to other cases and see if it holds. Like: where was the high rate era that followed from the invention of the internet? Rates have been falling more or less constantly since the mid nineties. And I’m not sure that it logically follows that we will only find solutions in search of a problem during low rates eras, or that high rates only happen during times when a solution to a problem is in the exploitation phase. So.. what’s the predictive value of this connection?
PaulHoule 4y ago
I know interest rates have a strong effect on tech stocks but my understanding is that they have their biggest impact on boring but capital intensive businesses such as cars and buildings. For instance Facebook was said to spend $10 billion on the "metaverse" last year but spending on building construction was about $1.5 trillion https://www.zippia.com/advice/us-construction-industry-statistics/ https://www.zippia.com/advice/us-construction-industry-stati... that said, total spending on R&D in the US was claimed to be about $660 billion in 2019 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20221/u-s-and-global-research-and-development https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20221/u-s-and-global-research-...
- mberning 4y ago
  Homes and cars are simply out of control. People are getting mortgage sized loans just to buy a family car. Something which will become worthless over 10 years of use. Getting a mortgage on a home is now a non-starter for a huge swath of the population. I suppose I can somewhat understand the price of homes going up. It's a durable item that, if reasonably maintained, has an unlimited useful life. A car on the other hand, no matter how well maintained, will become worthless in a decade. Freewheeling monetary policy does not just impact which cars a person is able to buy. It more insidiously impacts that cars which manufacturers choose to design and build. Even entry level cars are packed with features and electronics and carry a near $30k price tag. It's not going to be so easy for the industry to get back to building simple and cheap cars.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    // People are getting mortgage sized loans just to buy a family car I mean... That's insane hyperbole right? Below you are talking about $30k cars, in what universe does that approach "mortgage sized"?
    - lazide 4y ago
      Depending on your selection of ‘people’ it isn’t that odd - anyone financing a Tesla Model X for instance, is looking at $120k+ prices, and there are a LOT of them in many parts of the Bay Area.
ak_111 4y ago
I am wondering how much of the excessive (even to the point of lunacy) funding of stupid ideas in tech is due to a low-rate macro environment as opposed to a spray-and-pray gold rush that naturally gets triggered whenever someone hits gold in an area. After all it is hard to argue that AdSense, iPhones and AWS are not hugely profitable paradigm-shift innovations that would thrive in even the harshest macro environments, and the excessive mad funding are just ill-informed speculators trying their best to win the power law game as often happen in gold rushes.
- makestuff 4y ago
  I will be interested to see how much of a hit AWWS/Azure/GCP takes during this downturn. Suddenly startups are not going to be spending millions per year on cloud stuff stuff that they don't really need (ex: massive redshift cluster for your "data collection"). Furthermore, a large number of startups will cease to exist. I would guess large customers have account for a massive portion of cloud revenue; however, they also get much better pricing due to their scale. I would guess that the startups have to be where the gravy is since you are not getting a massive discount when you are small.
  - ak_111 4y ago
    I would be very surprised how much of start-ups spending is driving AWS adoption (it's probably less than 5-10% of their revenue). In the UK alone a huge chunk of the public sector and FTSE100 corporate sector has migrated to AWS and Azure to the point where they are national security risk.
    - makestuff 4y ago
      Fair point, it would be interesting to see a breakout reflected in earnings reports, but I doubt that would ever happen.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    In a sense AWS/Azure/GCP are doing startup investing, giving out tens of thousands of credits to basically any startup that asks for them, in the hope that most of them stay on their platform and some of those become huge (=big spenders). So if less startups are founded, startups fail earlier and startups build less-oversized architectures we might first see the effect in the beginning of the funnel, in terms of less free credits being spent. The hit to revenue would then take a couple years to fully materialize.
obblekk 4y ago
I really dislike these takes on low interest rates. As far back as the 70s (when interest rates were 8-15%), there have been random business ideas being started and shutdown (pet rocks, every airline ever, etc.). We don't remember those because they shutdown 40 years ago. Today, we only see the successful ones that survived (walmart, fedex, etc.). There's a legit question: why have long term interests declined over the past 500 years, accelerating in the past 50-100 years. The answer to that more likely has to do with some very broad phenomenon: capital has been accumulating due to increases in energy availability. Human talent (that turns capital into something actual) is plateauing due to slowing of population growth. Testable Prediction: we will have <1% fed interest rates again at some point before 2030, because the long term trend remains downward for now.
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  Have those random business ideas grown to anything like billion-dollar companies (adjusted for inflation) before everyone realized that oops, actually these things won't turn a profit? It's a fair argument to make that low interest rates (with can be thought of as a proxy for 'too much money chasing too few opportunities') take random ideas and inject them with far too much money. (Airline industry is a special case, eventual "failure" is part of the business plan, so leave those aside.)
  - obblekk 4y ago
    I'm not sure why airlines should be excluded. They were the "growth at all costs, we'll make it up on volume" business of the 70s and 80s. More capital invested than ever returned over 40 years. Other businesses like this: franchise restaurants (many, many failed), motels, car rentals (you can see the gold rush in supporting the new tourist economy back then).
  - majormajor 4y ago
    > (Airline industry is a special case, eventual "failure" is part of the business plan, so leave those aside.) You could make this statement about today's "unicorns" too, once you start excluding things. If you're cynical, be cynical equally. WeWork? Classic "greater fool" "let it fail after we cash out" company. Many others out there too. Crypto? 10000%. I'm sure there will be a bunch of "obvious failure in retrospect" companies in a large-language-model wave too.
Shinmon 4y ago
Solutions in search of a problem (SISP) are not necessarily tied to low interest rates. What might be tied to them is that companies with such solutions live longer because money is cheap. However, if you never make money, noone will give you money either. I think SISPs are a typical problem for tech-savy founders who think some kind of solution is really cool, because it solves them a problem. The problem however was never real. Engineers just tend to automate things that they have to do once a year and takes them about 1h. Automating it, is just more fun than actually doing it. Even worse with university spin off. They almost always start with a technology that solves problem thought of in research proposals.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > takes them about 1h. Automating it, is just more fun than actually doing it. Spot on. The joy of technological skill, being a programmer and engineer is that you can customise, reconfigure and shape the world in front of you. Other people see you playing and having fun, and say; "Hey, can you do that for me?" What was just scratching an itch becomes something others want to universalise. And that doesn't always work. > almost always start with a technology that solves problem thought of > in research proposals. Such proposals are often desperately scraping the barrel for ideas. Anything that combines grant-worthy buzzwords in a barely coherent way is fit for the game. > The problem however was never real. The tragedy is that the problems become real. Otherwise intelligent people see a bunch of PhDs frobicating widgets, and a bunch of wealthy investors throwing money at them. They read the self-affirming press reports on the research and the marketing hype about how Widgifrob PLC are the hottest new thing. Suddenly everyone has a widget that needs frobnicating. Low interest + easy capital + bloated academic research machine = new problems. It's a problem creation machine.
  - Shinmon 4y ago
    Research proposals are not supposed to necessarily solve current real-life problems so there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But given the amount of startups coming out of universities, the mindset is crazily wrong. So many people coming with a technology. If it's software you can at least pivot easily but if you got some kind of hardware technology, it becomes much less simple to do that. > Low interest + easy capital + bloated academic research machine = new problems. It's a problem creation machine. Not sure if I understand you correctly, but academy seems to be more of a solution creation machine without real problem solving. Problem solving as in someone will pay to get rid of the problem because it happens frequently and costs a lot of money each time.
rr888 4y ago
Surely Real Rates are the issue? Ie now when inflation is 7%+ and rates are 4%, rates are effectively lower than when inflation is 2% and rates are 1%. I'm not buying lots of these analyses.
- doubleunplussed 4y ago
  For what it's worth, since people make borrowing and lending decisions taking into account what they think inflation will be over the course of the loan, usually inflation predictions over the next however-many years are used to compute the effective real rate of interest, not the current rate of inflation.
moloch-hai 4y ago
It took some time to figure out that "low rates" means "low interest rates".
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wkmeade 4y ago
URL seems to have changed to: https://www.thediff.co/archive/a-solution-in-search-of-a-problem-is-a-low-rates-phenomenon/ https://www.thediff.co/archive/a-solution-in-search-of-a-pro... Link on this article took me to: https://www.thediff.co/archive/a-solution-in-search-of-a-problem/ https://www.thediff.co/archive/a-solution-in-search-of-a-pro...
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113 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

I thought this article had a good rule on how to differentiate dead end "solution in search of a problem" inventions and ones that might be successful. > whether the technology does something that would be useful if everyone had it, but is relatively useless at small scale I've often told my partner a lot of his "smart home" devices are solutions in search of problems. It seems to ride this line. Probably why despite my protests we keep winding up with more and I have to yell at alexa more frequently

sokoloff 4y ago
What about smart home devices would be useful if everyone had them but useless if only at your house? (I’m a tinkerer but still reluctant to deploy most smart home solutions because they usually fail the household acceptance factor.)
- pornel 4y ago
  Mesh networks, maybe? I like smart homes in principle, but the current implementations are awful. I end up sitting in the dark because software on my lightbulbs locks up, and a robot tells me "Sorry, I can't find 'lights on dammit' in your music library".
- ulrikrasmussen 4y ago
  I think it's a false dichotomy. Supposedly the GP thinks that their smart home devices are already useful, so there is no need to consider whether they would be more useful if more people had them. I think the quote from the article is a bit strange, and the example of clocks is not very good because people still had a way to tell time before clocks were invented (e.g. looking at the sun), it was just not very precise. A clock is still useful for a single person because that person now has a faster and more reliable way of telling the time without having to look out the window.
  - pm215 4y ago
    Yes, but it's not as useful as it is to a modern person, because if you're the only person who owns a clock then your life will have very few situations where knowing the time exactly and reliably matters -- so you only own one if you have some specific use-case where you care about exact time. The benefit of owning a precise and accurate clock becomes much greater if you are frequently interacting with other people who also have precise and accurate clocks (such as operators of railways), and at the point where most people in a society have an accurate clock then it becomes a default assumption that scheduling can be done by time and you will find it increasingly difficult to be without one. (I think the smartphone is currently going through a similar transition -- right now it is definitely still possible to live without a smartphone, but an increasing number of organizations are now starting to act on the assumption that every person they deal with does have one.)
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    I think the point of the analogy is that a clock isn't very useful for an individual, unless enough other people around you also have one. You don't gain much from being able to accurately tell the time down to minutes or seconds, because by far the biggest non-specialist use of clocks is synchronizing with other people. You'll come by the store at 08:00 sharp, and discover it's closed, because the day is cloudy and the storeowner's rooster overslept, so he still thinks it's early. Such fundamental technologies have also a perverse tipping point, a kind of strong network effect in disguise. Continuing with the analogy, once enough people have clocks and start coordinating with them, they'll start forcing their preference on others, and soon enough everyone has to get a clock, or else they won't be able to synchronize with the society around them. With timekeeping, this arguably happened before most of us were alive. But a more recent example, one that's being regularly lamented in bars and in press, is cellphones (and even more recently, smartphones): they went from a rich people's toy to being ubiquitous in ~decade, and these days there's a strong social expectation that you own one, and that through it, you're accessible during waking hours. People slightly older than I am call it an invisible chain/tether. Our children will probably call it "normal", just like my generation considers clocks normal.
- malfist 4y ago
  I think there's a lot to be said about smart home devices and accessibility. I could imagine voice assistants controlling devices for those with vision impairments or mobility impairments would be a huge boon.
adriancr 4y ago
> I've often told my partner a lot of his "smart home" devices are solutions in search of problems "smart home" things are usually hobbies at small scale, and you never know if something ends up being useful/useless until you actually try it out
jchw 4y ago
I love smart home stuff, but greatly prefer open source compatible (Home Assistant etc), non-internet-connected smart home equipment that still has hardware switches. There's no good standard for RGBW addressability over wires here in the U.S. (that I'm aware of) so I do use some Philips Hue bulbs, but only accompanied by a hard-wired switch capable of associating directly with the bulb, so that all it needs to work is power. I will admit though that I still mostly just do it because it's fun. But hey, it's fun that comes in handy, too.
- makestuff 4y ago
  Yeah if someone came out with a piece of hardware that could run the an NLP model to detect the common phrases (turn lights on/off, play music, etc.) and then have it prepackaged with home assistant it would ruin a lot of these cloud connected devices.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  System like X10 or power line Ethernet that communicate over power lines have huge transformers and I think high power consumption. You’d think you could have power line Ethernet in your PC or X10 bulbs but it is not so practical.
  - jchw 4y ago
    Yeah, powerline data transmission seems impractical. It works, but reliability has always been a huge problem for me, even with the most expensive adapters. Now that I own instead of rent, I just run ethernet for my computers. For smart home, I don't really care for throwing RF at every single problem, but ZigBee and Zwave at least do work, so I am just doing that for now. What would be cool is just having something simple, like maybe one or two wire serial, at least between the switches and bulbs. Today, the best solution I'm aware of for smart bulbs is something like Inovelli Blue Series or Embrighten switches, which can associate with the bulbs directly. Even though in smart bulb it must use RF, it can at least skip the hub and work when everything else is down. (Though, I am a little disappointed that I had to bypass the power control for my Blue Series. I was hoping I could have it connected to measure power usage even in smart bulb mode, but it seems even in smart bulb mode where the power is passthru you still can't have an inductive load like a ceiling fan motor or it will cause problems. Bummer.)
PaulHoule 4y ago
My smart home gadgets are a common source of controversy in my house. I have some rooms with dimmable lights that work really well even if there is some latency. I have other ones where there are chronic reliability problems usually because I tried to get a Sengled switch to work a Hue light or something like that. I’d say my project success rate has been about 50%. Hue made a really great switch which is piezoelectric powered and doesn’t need a battery but these are now crazy expensive and hard to find. I think switches are affected by supply chain issues but might not be stocked at places like Best Guy because plenty of people seem to have a smartphone grafted to them and just use the phone as a switch.
Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
I'm baffled at what purpose there is to voice-activated lights. Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. If I'm entering or exiting a room, I turn the light on or off as I pass the switch. This is going to be much faster than "Alexa, turn the computer room lights off" on my way out and then waiting to make sure it understood me. The only exception is my front porch light. I usually leave it off, but turn it on when I'm expecting a food delivery at night. Being able to turn it on from my computer room remotely could be nice, but I'm not going to begin investing into a "smart home" for that one purpose. My TV and clothes washer are both "smart", but I don't use any of the smart features, and neither have ever been connected to my WiFi. The only smart appliance I have is a thermostat, and even that one is pretty basic. It has an app that I can use to control it and create a schedule, but it doesn't try to learn when people are home.
- acdha 4y ago
  I think a lot of this comes back to the way everyone has been focused on building huge mainstream businesses for a long time. Many IoT devices are useful to many people but not at the scale companies like Amazon or Google want — people with vision or mobility impairments, for example, find voice control far more useful than other people but that isn’t a huge market and many of them are low income. Parents with babies probably use voice controls more than they used to but that only lasts so long and then becomes a problem until they protect the ability to have Alexa order more LEGO sets - and not anything people are jumping to subscribe to. There could probably be a medium-sized business model which works but not the kind of hyper-scale vision that SV has favored. Apple seems to have the best balance putting the smarts in devices you were already buying for other reasons, and being able to concentrate more than one promotion cycle out which Google struggles with.
- __derek__ 4y ago
  > Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. Not necessarily. Open layouts have taken the office and residential markets by storm over the last two decades. Many "rooms" don't have well-defined boundaries, so it's common not to have a switch everywhere someone might enter.
- malfist 4y ago

black_puppydog 4y ago

> [...] products that ultimately turned out to be dead ends, like the Palm Pilot [...] Huh? I never had a Pilot, but from everything I've read about it (and how people who did have one describe it) it was quite amazing, and arguably the predecessor of the smartphone, no? I get that the product line is dead, but the concept was very much viable...

anthonybsd 4y ago
Palm Pilot was a huge success both from a sales perspective and from "getting consumers comfortable with touch screen" perspective. The author of the article has a very poor choice of metaphors and examples which really obscures his point.
electroly 4y ago
I had several Palm devices. As I recall there was a fairly long gap between the death of PDAs and the birth of smartphones. I certainly did not replace my Palm with a smartphone; I replaced it with nothing, and then years later I got a smartphone. Most of the things that are amazing about smartphones were not present on my Palm IIIe, FWIW.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Are you sure? You might have replaced it with a smaller, lighter, more-powerful laptop that you could more easily use on the train or a flight, and a Blackberry phone that had a lot of Palm features built into it (minus the screen and stylus of course).
- michaelhoffman 4y ago
  If we're trading anecdotes, I certainly replaced my Palm with a smartphone. In fact, my first smartphone was a Palm. Anyway, I don't think the Palm Pilot was a dead end. It's hard to see it not influencing Blackberries and smartphones.
- ipsi 4y ago
  > there was a fairly long gap between the death of PDAs and the birth of smartphones. Only if you define the birth of smartphones as starting with Android/iPhone. Palm released their own smartphones using the same OS as their PDAs (the Treo line) prior to that, and Microsoft had Windows Mobile plus a bundle of third-party manufacturers. Plus Blackberry had been around the whole time, too. Looking it up, it seems that Palm Tungsten TX[1] was produced in 2005, 1.5-2 years after they started producing the Treo 600[2], which was one of the first smartphones - yes, it was inferior to the iPhone in a number of ways, but having owned a Treo 680, in my mind it still qualifies as a smartphone. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_TX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_TX [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_600 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_600

javier123454321 4y ago

Above the fold, self promotion... below the fold, a popup to sign up without reading it. I can't be bothered to click out. I can be bothered however to write this comment to complain to the state of the SEOfication of all content. Maybe it's good, but I'm immediately skeptical.

jameshart 4y ago

I think the point being made here is that when a solution has found its problem, exploitation of that solution drives up rates, because rolling out the solution is an ‘easy money’ investment. Seems reasonable. I can buy that connection. The motor vehicle example makes sense. Of course you then have to hold that theory up to other cases and see if it holds. Like: where was the high rate era that followed from the invention of the internet? Rates have been falling more or less constantly since the mid nineties. And I’m not sure that it logically follows that we will only find solutions in search of a problem during low rates eras, or that high rates only happen during times when a solution to a problem is in the exploitation phase. So.. what’s the predictive value of this connection?

PaulHoule 4y ago

I know interest rates have a strong effect on tech stocks but my understanding is that they have their biggest impact on boring but capital intensive businesses such as cars and buildings. For instance Facebook was said to spend $10 billion on the "metaverse" last year but spending on building construction was about $1.5 trillion https://www.zippia.com/advice/us-construction-industry-statistics/ https://www.zippia.com/advice/us-construction-industry-stati... that said, total spending on R&D in the US was claimed to be about $660 billion in 2019 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20221/u-s-and-global-research-and-development https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20221/u-s-and-global-research-...

mberning 4y ago
Homes and cars are simply out of control. People are getting mortgage sized loans just to buy a family car. Something which will become worthless over 10 years of use. Getting a mortgage on a home is now a non-starter for a huge swath of the population. I suppose I can somewhat understand the price of homes going up. It's a durable item that, if reasonably maintained, has an unlimited useful life. A car on the other hand, no matter how well maintained, will become worthless in a decade. Freewheeling monetary policy does not just impact which cars a person is able to buy. It more insidiously impacts that cars which manufacturers choose to design and build. Even entry level cars are packed with features and electronics and carry a near $30k price tag. It's not going to be so easy for the industry to get back to building simple and cheap cars.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  // People are getting mortgage sized loans just to buy a family car I mean... That's insane hyperbole right? Below you are talking about $30k cars, in what universe does that approach "mortgage sized"?
  - lazide 4y ago
    Depending on your selection of ‘people’ it isn’t that odd - anyone financing a Tesla Model X for instance, is looking at $120k+ prices, and there are a LOT of them in many parts of the Bay Area.

ak_111 4y ago

I am wondering how much of the excessive (even to the point of lunacy) funding of stupid ideas in tech is due to a low-rate macro environment as opposed to a spray-and-pray gold rush that naturally gets triggered whenever someone hits gold in an area. After all it is hard to argue that AdSense, iPhones and AWS are not hugely profitable paradigm-shift innovations that would thrive in even the harshest macro environments, and the excessive mad funding are just ill-informed speculators trying their best to win the power law game as often happen in gold rushes.

makestuff 4y ago
I will be interested to see how much of a hit AWWS/Azure/GCP takes during this downturn. Suddenly startups are not going to be spending millions per year on cloud stuff stuff that they don't really need (ex: massive redshift cluster for your "data collection"). Furthermore, a large number of startups will cease to exist. I would guess large customers have account for a massive portion of cloud revenue; however, they also get much better pricing due to their scale. I would guess that the startups have to be where the gravy is since you are not getting a massive discount when you are small.
- ak_111 4y ago
  I would be very surprised how much of start-ups spending is driving AWS adoption (it's probably less than 5-10% of their revenue). In the UK alone a huge chunk of the public sector and FTSE100 corporate sector has migrated to AWS and Azure to the point where they are national security risk.
  - makestuff 4y ago
    Fair point, it would be interesting to see a breakout reflected in earnings reports, but I doubt that would ever happen.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  In a sense AWS/Azure/GCP are doing startup investing, giving out tens of thousands of credits to basically any startup that asks for them, in the hope that most of them stay on their platform and some of those become huge (=big spenders). So if less startups are founded, startups fail earlier and startups build less-oversized architectures we might first see the effect in the beginning of the funnel, in terms of less free credits being spent. The hit to revenue would then take a couple years to fully materialize.

obblekk 4y ago

I really dislike these takes on low interest rates. As far back as the 70s (when interest rates were 8-15%), there have been random business ideas being started and shutdown (pet rocks, every airline ever, etc.). We don't remember those because they shutdown 40 years ago. Today, we only see the successful ones that survived (walmart, fedex, etc.). There's a legit question: why have long term interests declined over the past 500 years, accelerating in the past 50-100 years. The answer to that more likely has to do with some very broad phenomenon: capital has been accumulating due to increases in energy availability. Human talent (that turns capital into something actual) is plateauing due to slowing of population growth. Testable Prediction: we will have <1% fed interest rates again at some point before 2030, because the long term trend remains downward for now.

kspacewalk2 4y ago
Have those random business ideas grown to anything like billion-dollar companies (adjusted for inflation) before everyone realized that oops, actually these things won't turn a profit? It's a fair argument to make that low interest rates (with can be thought of as a proxy for 'too much money chasing too few opportunities') take random ideas and inject them with far too much money. (Airline industry is a special case, eventual "failure" is part of the business plan, so leave those aside.)
- obblekk 4y ago
  I'm not sure why airlines should be excluded. They were the "growth at all costs, we'll make it up on volume" business of the 70s and 80s. More capital invested than ever returned over 40 years. Other businesses like this: franchise restaurants (many, many failed), motels, car rentals (you can see the gold rush in supporting the new tourist economy back then).
- majormajor 4y ago
  > (Airline industry is a special case, eventual "failure" is part of the business plan, so leave those aside.) You could make this statement about today's "unicorns" too, once you start excluding things. If you're cynical, be cynical equally. WeWork? Classic "greater fool" "let it fail after we cash out" company. Many others out there too. Crypto? 10000%. I'm sure there will be a bunch of "obvious failure in retrospect" companies in a large-language-model wave too.

Shinmon 4y ago

Solutions in search of a problem (SISP) are not necessarily tied to low interest rates. What might be tied to them is that companies with such solutions live longer because money is cheap. However, if you never make money, noone will give you money either. I think SISPs are a typical problem for tech-savy founders who think some kind of solution is really cool, because it solves them a problem. The problem however was never real. Engineers just tend to automate things that they have to do once a year and takes them about 1h. Automating it, is just more fun than actually doing it. Even worse with university spin off. They almost always start with a technology that solves problem thought of in research proposals.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> takes them about 1h. Automating it, is just more fun than actually doing it. Spot on. The joy of technological skill, being a programmer and engineer is that you can customise, reconfigure and shape the world in front of you. Other people see you playing and having fun, and say; "Hey, can you do that for me?" What was just scratching an itch becomes something others want to universalise. And that doesn't always work. > almost always start with a technology that solves problem thought of > in research proposals. Such proposals are often desperately scraping the barrel for ideas. Anything that combines grant-worthy buzzwords in a barely coherent way is fit for the game. > The problem however was never real. The tragedy is that the problems become real. Otherwise intelligent people see a bunch of PhDs frobicating widgets, and a bunch of wealthy investors throwing money at them. They read the self-affirming press reports on the research and the marketing hype about how Widgifrob PLC are the hottest new thing. Suddenly everyone has a widget that needs frobnicating. Low interest + easy capital + bloated academic research machine = new problems. It's a problem creation machine.
- Shinmon 4y ago
  Research proposals are not supposed to necessarily solve current real-life problems so there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But given the amount of startups coming out of universities, the mindset is crazily wrong. So many people coming with a technology. If it's software you can at least pivot easily but if you got some kind of hardware technology, it becomes much less simple to do that. > Low interest + easy capital + bloated academic research machine = new problems. It's a problem creation machine. Not sure if I understand you correctly, but academy seems to be more of a solution creation machine without real problem solving. Problem solving as in someone will pay to get rid of the problem because it happens frequently and costs a lot of money each time.

rr888 4y ago

Surely Real Rates are the issue? Ie now when inflation is 7%+ and rates are 4%, rates are effectively lower than when inflation is 2% and rates are 1%. I'm not buying lots of these analyses.

doubleunplussed 4y ago
For what it's worth, since people make borrowing and lending decisions taking into account what they think inflation will be over the course of the loan, usually inflation predictions over the next however-many years are used to compute the effective real rate of interest, not the current rate of inflation.

moloch-hai 4y ago

It took some time to figure out that "low rates" means "low interest rates".

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wkmeade 4y ago

URL seems to have changed to: https://www.thediff.co/archive/a-solution-in-search-of-a-problem-is-a-low-rates-phenomenon/ https://www.thediff.co/archive/a-solution-in-search-of-a-pro... Link on this article took me to: https://www.thediff.co/archive/a-solution-in-search-of-a-problem/ https://www.thediff.co/archive/a-solution-in-search-of-a-pro...

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