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At risk of upsetting this thread’s balance and reducing it to negativity: I prefer your parent comment’s interpretation of the Go. “Ahead of its time”? Technolo

At risk of upsetting this thread’s balance and reducing it to negativity: I prefer your parent comment’s interpretation of the Go. “Ahead of its time”? Technology is the last space where a newfangled product would lose momentum by being released to early. I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Subscription music services like Rhapsody provided what Apple Music does now 15 years ago, and they died out (similarly Microsoft’s Zune service). Maybe this is what you’re saying? - All the same, I would trump these examples up to poor marketing, management, and product specifics. Apple Music isn’t releasing their service at a better time. They just put a lot more effort into it, and it provides the service better. (Their phone ecosystem plays a big part in this.) This example could be extended into saying that the Go just wasn’t good enough (thus: Carmack failed). FWIW: I’m a Carmack fan, and I base a lot of how I use Emacs on his wisdom accumulated over the years. For example, his recent shift to VSCode has inspired me to think in that direction.

cudgy 4y ago
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? TabletPC and Newton before it.
swordsmith 4y ago
> I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Google glass as an AR device
chrisco255 4y ago
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Uh yeah, VR itself as a concept and models of VR have been live since the 80s but were especially hyped in the 90s but never went anywhere beyond amusement parks and arcades. And no one wanted to touch VR in the 00s despite huge leaps in processing power. I would even argue the original Macintosh was ahead of its time, maybe because it was too expensive and too hard to upgrade. As a result, DOS and Windows and IBM clones took the PC market, despite coming later and initially being inferior. Lots of such examples in history.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  I enjoy this as a friendly/elucidating discussion and don’t want to annoy or antagonize you (just don’t respond if I do). I do appreciate your take on the original Macintosh. VR has never been ahead of its time in that it’s never had a time. It still hasn’t made its way into any sort of popular acceptance. The gaming industry is the only space in which it has made significant strides. If VR circles back around to popular acceptance of something like Carmack’s vision (like the Mac has done with Job’s) your point will be valid. As it stands, Carmack’s vision failed, and Meta continues to experiment and R&D with different directions. Carmack’s decision to leave more closely aligns with the ideas expressed in the comment that started this IMO. I’m literally invested in Meta’s endeavors here. (FMET through Fidelity Investments.) The previous sentence is just communicating my bias that I think they have the right idea in the long run.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Between Oculus, Vive, and other various competitors, VR has been successful in many ways that it wasn't able to achieve 20 years ago. If you set the bar so high that it needs to be as successful as the personal computer or the mobile phone, sure. But I wouldn't call Oculus or modern VR a failure. It's a niche success.
    - dwighttk 4y ago
      > If you set the bar so high that it needs to be as successful as the personal computer or the mobile phone… Seems like Meta has done that
  - scheeseman486 4y ago
    Carmack's vision culminated in Quest 2, which is the only hardware Meta has produced that any significant number of people care about. Instead of Macintosh, I might point at Commodore. Affordable hardware with success in some niches like video production, but poor broader acceptance beyond gaming markets. Weirdly out of touch management with a yearning to be accepted by stuffy business types, but completely misjudging wants and needs. With Quest Pro I get vibes of the Commodore 128, a game machine trying and failing to be a Serious Business Device.
somehnacct3757 4y ago
I've always thought that TiVo was way ahead of its time. The company is still alive but it feels weird to talk about it in present tense when we've got Roku, Chromecast, Firestick, and Apple TV. Even the era of cable provider DVRs made me feel like TiVo was ahead of its time!
- ghaff 4y ago
  TiVo was sort of a niche and basically as soon as DVRs weren't, the mainstream was fine with just using whatever they got from their cable provider.
- mmcconnell1618 4y ago
  Tivo nailed the user experience which is why it took off. In the early years, the response time on the interface was nearly instant for everything. This made it delightful to use because it felt like an extension of your intentions. Today, even with all the content in the world available, there are far more delays and wait times because the content is streaming and not local. Even YouTube TV, which could have the same 10ms response time as Stadia, is slow in many places.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Maybe as a company. The idea of the actual device seems very tied to a particular time, not ahead of it. The point was to record broadcast TV (so, reliant on the time when broadcast TV was the main way of getting TV) and the ability to skip ads (nowadays any streaming service worth watching doesn’t have ads anyway).
- AceyMan 4y ago
  footnote: The TiVo UX was superb but, for my money, ReplayTV was superior, technically. And, worth mentioning, its UX was not lacking in any perceivable way; OK, maybe less flair & eye candy than TiVo, but also really, really good in its discoverability & daily usability.
ChildOfChaos 4y ago
Stadia is a great example. I am still using it today before the shut down, it's amazing how it's actually got me into playing games again and it's fantastic for casual games with friends since everyone can play no matter there hardware and the multiplayer features are fantastic for this. It works and it is fantastic, but it's ahead of it's time and most people don't know what it is. That and Google's mismanagement of the service, but if it was an accepted thing, Google wouldn't have had to push it ahead so much, but since it wasn't they did and they failed.
- tcmart14 4y ago
  I don't know if we really pin the blame on that for stadia. Maybe portions, but I also suspect that a big reason for stadia's "failure" wasn't necessarily Google's/Stadia's fault. Lots of homes still have really bad internet connections. I tried stadia, I think the concept is great and most everything is there except I can't get a decent enough internet connection from any ISP in my area to make it usable at home. But I know people is places with really good internet connections and have heard nothing but good things about it before I tried.
  - semi 4y ago
    As someone that had stadia and a good enough connection for it, the technology was honestly really impressive. The problem for me was that it was yet another platform. I already have many games I'd like to keep playing, I don't want to buy another copy that can only be used on stadia. I don't want to buy anything on stadia and then only be able to stream it while I still have a gaming pc.
    - tcmart14 4y ago
      For sure I definitely see that, but I think Stadia solves a different problem. If you are already heavily invested in something like Steam and have the hardware, Stadia doesn't really solve your problem. If you don't have the hardware, maybe the computer you can afford is a $200 netbook, or you can't travel with your gaming PC, but can pay the monthly fee and occasionally the cost of a game, then Stadia could solve the problem, barring a good enough internet connection. Which when I tried it was my case. I didn't have a gaming PC, I just bought an M1 Macbook Air, so didn't really wanna dish out more money for hardware, Stadia could have allowed me to game on my M1, but once again, bad internet connection. How I play locally and have games on Steam since my job provided me with a home gaming PC and they don't care what I do with it so long as I can work from home with it (no company spyware). But yea, if you have the hardware already, the value add wasn't really there. But for the broke college student, or broke adult who can't justify dropping hundreds/thousands today but can eat a few bucks a month. Or someone who travels often for personal or work, then the value add is there.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
justin66 4y ago
> Technology is the last space where a newfangled product would lose momentum by being released to early. > I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Is this a joke?
iforgotpassword 4y ago
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Well I think we might have different ideas of what "ahead of its time" exactly is. I would include - and I think I hinted at that with "released too early" - things that simply weren't refined enough technically, as well as things that relied on other technology that simply wasn't capable, widespread or accepted enough at their time. So regarding Rhapsody for example, it was released in 2001, a time where the majority of people was still on dial up iirc, and even if you were one of the lucky ones with a DSL connection, you might've had a metered connection, so music streaming was just... ahead of it's time.
zamalek 4y ago
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Smartphones. Microsoft and Symbian were at least 7 years ahead of Apple. The manner in which they squandered the opportunity aside, most people simply didn't care about having email on their phone.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Most people still don't care about having email on their phone: that's not what they use their phone for most of the time. They use it for text chats, taking photos, playing games, navigating, etc. I'd say email ranks pretty low in importance. Those other companies failed because they had clunky UIs and thought that most people really cared about typing emails on their phones; they didn't. Apple finally proved that people want something easy to use that does things they want to do (which isn't email).
NovaVeles 4y ago
One step ahead is an innovation. Two steps ahead is a Martyr.
nickstinemates 4y ago
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Webvan. 2000 era shopping as a service. Predates instacart, uber eats, etc. World wasn't ready for it.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  Have the modern versions of those services made any money yet, though? They could just be bad business models which are being help up by VC money.
  - nickstinemates 4y ago
    It's unclear if the companies could be profitable because of the VC propping them up. That said, the service economy is here to stay.
CamperBob2 4y ago
Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted Mobile devices with clunky resistive touchscreens come to mind. The iPhone was hardly the first "smartphone," but Jobs's key insight was to have people sitting by the river waiting for decent touchscreen technology to come floating by. When capacitive multitouch happened, it was a classic example of apparent "good luck" being equal to "preparation meets opportunity." Musk is obviously trying to camp the same spawning grounds with Neuralink. Teletext might be another example, as the predecessor to the WWW. Putting a lot of money into advancing Teletext development would have resulted in WebTV at best, and more likely just an expensive waste of time. Any of dozens of personal computer models in the 1980s, some quite advanced, that weren't made by Apple or IBM. Navigation and infotainment in cars -- Buick's early CRT touchscreen and Honda's "electric gyrocator" for navigation come to mind. There was no point trying to do either of those things at the time. Minidisc as an early embodiment of advanced DSP techniques for lossy audio compression. ATRAC could have been MP3 but wasn't, because Sony. Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense. Not hard to come up with examples that answer this question, for sure.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense. I'm not it really needed to; analog laserdiscs were a huge improvement over existing videotapes, at least for distribution of movies (not for recording obviously). The main problem was the price: they were expensive as hell. Not sure if that was due to technical limitations, or the players pricing it high because it was a "premium" format and they priced themselves into irrelevance and obscurity. I've seen this with many other technologies over the years: someone introduces something really cool, but it's so damn expensive no one buys it, so it goes nowhere, and eventually some cheaper alternative comes along and becomes the new standard.

cudgy 4y ago

> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? TabletPC and Newton before it.

swordsmith 4y ago

> I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Google glass as an AR device

chrisco255 4y ago

> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Uh yeah, VR itself as a concept and models of VR have been live since the 80s but were especially hyped in the 90s but never went anywhere beyond amusement parks and arcades. And no one wanted to touch VR in the 00s despite huge leaps in processing power. I would even argue the original Macintosh was ahead of its time, maybe because it was too expensive and too hard to upgrade. As a result, DOS and Windows and IBM clones took the PC market, despite coming later and initially being inferior. Lots of such examples in history.

comfypotato 4y ago
I enjoy this as a friendly/elucidating discussion and don’t want to annoy or antagonize you (just don’t respond if I do). I do appreciate your take on the original Macintosh. VR has never been ahead of its time in that it’s never had a time. It still hasn’t made its way into any sort of popular acceptance. The gaming industry is the only space in which it has made significant strides. If VR circles back around to popular acceptance of something like Carmack’s vision (like the Mac has done with Job’s) your point will be valid. As it stands, Carmack’s vision failed, and Meta continues to experiment and R&D with different directions. Carmack’s decision to leave more closely aligns with the ideas expressed in the comment that started this IMO. I’m literally invested in Meta’s endeavors here. (FMET through Fidelity Investments.) The previous sentence is just communicating my bias that I think they have the right idea in the long run.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Between Oculus, Vive, and other various competitors, VR has been successful in many ways that it wasn't able to achieve 20 years ago. If you set the bar so high that it needs to be as successful as the personal computer or the mobile phone, sure. But I wouldn't call Oculus or modern VR a failure. It's a niche success.
  - dwighttk 4y ago
    > If you set the bar so high that it needs to be as successful as the personal computer or the mobile phone… Seems like Meta has done that
- scheeseman486 4y ago
  Carmack's vision culminated in Quest 2, which is the only hardware Meta has produced that any significant number of people care about. Instead of Macintosh, I might point at Commodore. Affordable hardware with success in some niches like video production, but poor broader acceptance beyond gaming markets. Weirdly out of touch management with a yearning to be accepted by stuffy business types, but completely misjudging wants and needs. With Quest Pro I get vibes of the Commodore 128, a game machine trying and failing to be a Serious Business Device.

somehnacct3757 4y ago

I've always thought that TiVo was way ahead of its time. The company is still alive but it feels weird to talk about it in present tense when we've got Roku, Chromecast, Firestick, and Apple TV. Even the era of cable provider DVRs made me feel like TiVo was ahead of its time!

ghaff 4y ago
TiVo was sort of a niche and basically as soon as DVRs weren't, the mainstream was fine with just using whatever they got from their cable provider.
mmcconnell1618 4y ago
Tivo nailed the user experience which is why it took off. In the early years, the response time on the interface was nearly instant for everything. This made it delightful to use because it felt like an extension of your intentions. Today, even with all the content in the world available, there are far more delays and wait times because the content is streaming and not local. Even YouTube TV, which could have the same 10ms response time as Stadia, is slow in many places.
bee_rider 4y ago
Maybe as a company. The idea of the actual device seems very tied to a particular time, not ahead of it. The point was to record broadcast TV (so, reliant on the time when broadcast TV was the main way of getting TV) and the ability to skip ads (nowadays any streaming service worth watching doesn’t have ads anyway).
AceyMan 4y ago
footnote: The TiVo UX was superb but, for my money, ReplayTV was superior, technically. And, worth mentioning, its UX was not lacking in any perceivable way; OK, maybe less flair & eye candy than TiVo, but also really, really good in its discoverability & daily usability.

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

Stadia is a great example. I am still using it today before the shut down, it's amazing how it's actually got me into playing games again and it's fantastic for casual games with friends since everyone can play no matter there hardware and the multiplayer features are fantastic for this. It works and it is fantastic, but it's ahead of it's time and most people don't know what it is. That and Google's mismanagement of the service, but if it was an accepted thing, Google wouldn't have had to push it ahead so much, but since it wasn't they did and they failed.

tcmart14 4y ago
I don't know if we really pin the blame on that for stadia. Maybe portions, but I also suspect that a big reason for stadia's "failure" wasn't necessarily Google's/Stadia's fault. Lots of homes still have really bad internet connections. I tried stadia, I think the concept is great and most everything is there except I can't get a decent enough internet connection from any ISP in my area to make it usable at home. But I know people is places with really good internet connections and have heard nothing but good things about it before I tried.
- semi 4y ago
  As someone that had stadia and a good enough connection for it, the technology was honestly really impressive. The problem for me was that it was yet another platform. I already have many games I'd like to keep playing, I don't want to buy another copy that can only be used on stadia. I don't want to buy anything on stadia and then only be able to stream it while I still have a gaming pc.
  - tcmart14 4y ago
    For sure I definitely see that, but I think Stadia solves a different problem. If you are already heavily invested in something like Steam and have the hardware, Stadia doesn't really solve your problem. If you don't have the hardware, maybe the computer you can afford is a $200 netbook, or you can't travel with your gaming PC, but can pay the monthly fee and occasionally the cost of a game, then Stadia could solve the problem, barring a good enough internet connection. Which when I tried it was my case. I didn't have a gaming PC, I just bought an M1 Macbook Air, so didn't really wanna dish out more money for hardware, Stadia could have allowed me to game on my M1, but once again, bad internet connection. How I play locally and have games on Steam since my job provided me with a home gaming PC and they don't care what I do with it so long as I can work from home with it (no company spyware). But yea, if you have the hardware already, the value add wasn't really there. But for the broke college student, or broke adult who can't justify dropping hundreds/thousands today but can eat a few bucks a month. Or someone who travels often for personal or work, then the value add is there.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

justin66 4y ago

> Technology is the last space where a newfangled product would lose momentum by being released to early. > I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Is this a joke?

iforgotpassword 4y ago

> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Well I think we might have different ideas of what "ahead of its time" exactly is. I would include - and I think I hinted at that with "released too early" - things that simply weren't refined enough technically, as well as things that relied on other technology that simply wasn't capable, widespread or accepted enough at their time. So regarding Rhapsody for example, it was released in 2001, a time where the majority of people was still on dial up iirc, and even if you were one of the lucky ones with a DSL connection, you might've had a metered connection, so music streaming was just... ahead of it's time.

zamalek 4y ago

> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Smartphones. Microsoft and Symbian were at least 7 years ahead of Apple. The manner in which they squandered the opportunity aside, most people simply didn't care about having email on their phone.

midoridensha 4y ago
Most people still don't care about having email on their phone: that's not what they use their phone for most of the time. They use it for text chats, taking photos, playing games, navigating, etc. I'd say email ranks pretty low in importance. Those other companies failed because they had clunky UIs and thought that most people really cared about typing emails on their phones; they didn't. Apple finally proved that people want something easy to use that does things they want to do (which isn't email).

NovaVeles 4y ago

One step ahead is an innovation. Two steps ahead is a Martyr.

nickstinemates 4y ago

> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Webvan. 2000 era shopping as a service. Predates instacart, uber eats, etc. World wasn't ready for it.

Eisenstein 4y ago
Have the modern versions of those services made any money yet, though? They could just be bad business models which are being help up by VC money.
- nickstinemates 4y ago
  It's unclear if the companies could be profitable because of the VC propping them up. That said, the service economy is here to stay.

CamperBob2 4y ago

Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted Mobile devices with clunky resistive touchscreens come to mind. The iPhone was hardly the first "smartphone," but Jobs's key insight was to have people sitting by the river waiting for decent touchscreen technology to come floating by. When capacitive multitouch happened, it was a classic example of apparent "good luck" being equal to "preparation meets opportunity." Musk is obviously trying to camp the same spawning grounds with Neuralink. Teletext might be another example, as the predecessor to the WWW. Putting a lot of money into advancing Teletext development would have resulted in WebTV at best, and more likely just an expensive waste of time. Any of dozens of personal computer models in the 1980s, some quite advanced, that weren't made by Apple or IBM. Navigation and infotainment in cars -- Buick's early CRT touchscreen and Honda's "electric gyrocator" for navigation come to mind. There was no point trying to do either of those things at the time. Minidisc as an early embodiment of advanced DSP techniques for lossy audio compression. ATRAC could have been MP3 but wasn't, because Sony. Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense. Not hard to come up with examples that answer this question, for sure.

midoridensha 4y ago
>Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense. I'm not it really needed to; analog laserdiscs were a huge improvement over existing videotapes, at least for distribution of movies (not for recording obviously). The main problem was the price: they were expensive as hell. Not sure if that was due to technical limitations, or the players pricing it high because it was a "premium" format and they priced themselves into irrelevance and obscurity. I've seen this with many other technologies over the years: someone introduces something really cool, but it's so damn expensive no one buys it, so it goes nowhere, and eventually some cheaper alternative comes along and becomes the new standard.