6 ms·

You Are Not Late

134 points by applecore 12y ago

gregpilling 12y ago
I remember having McDonalds.com in a shopping cart, ready to buy it. It was 1993 and I wasn't sure if it was worth $35 per year - I expected I would get sued. I chickened out, and didn't buy any dot com domain names, and went back to my business at the time that had nothing to do with tech. I also chickened out from buying any other domain name until 1999. So one of my life regrets is that I didn't buy a whole lot of domain names in 1993 when I first looked at them. A few millions in income missed.....
- kordless 12y ago
  You were afraid to do it. The sale of the domain later for a large amount of money resolved that fear inside you, only leaving the desire to have bought it. This is regret defined. While it serves a purpose in our lives in teaching a lesson, it makes very little logical sense to wish for a future scenario where you are less afraid, or more intent without considering the reasons why you were to begin with. To avoid regret, realize and accept you are going to make mistakes. To avoid regret, face your fears when they are presented to you. The choice to do what scares you the most is the single most important ability you have in controlling your fate in this universe.
  - meowface 12y ago
    What would stop McDonalds from suing him if he refused to relinquish the domain name for free? Couldn't they claim it was trademark infringement? Edit: Changed "copyright" to "trademark".
    - UweSchmidt 12y ago
      Back then things weren't as clear-cut and I believe a lot of money changed hands when corporations realized that they need their website right now.
      - pasbesoin 12y ago
        You can be too late, with respect to certain windows. For a while, people made significant money selling highly desired domain names, including to big companies. Now, those companies just "take them away" via trademark infringement claims. The legal structure for doing so has since been constructed and tested by them. One of my concerns is that more and more such windows are being closed. It's not the isolated case, but the overall trend towards a corporate and corporate state restricted "push" implementation. I.e. the end of "open".
        meowface 12y ago
        I don't really see how disallowing people from registering a name already in use by a person or company goes against "openness". If you're using someone else's name, I think they're justified in trying to forcibly retake control of it.
    - chimeracoder 12y ago
      > Couldn't they claim it was copyright infringement? No, though they could claim trademark infringement (which is an important difference). Trademarks can (but do not need to be) registered in order to be protected, and an unregistered trademark can trump a registered trademark if it precedes the registered one, if it is in a sufficiently different "category", if it is geographically distinct, or for a number of other reasons. One interesting example is the Burger King in Mattoon, Illinois[0]. The USPTO is very clear to note that registering a trademark is not a guarantee of validity of the trademark, and they do not issue refunds on the application if the trademark is successfully challenged and invalidated later. In this particular case he'd be less likely to win against McDonald's, especially if all he's doing is domain squatting.... but you never know - take a look at http://www.chaseonline.com http://www.chaseonline.com . [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_%28Mattoon,_Illinois%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_%28Mattoon,_Illino...
nemo1618 12y ago
thanks, I really needed this. I had similar feelings about computer hardware for years.
jonathanyc 12y ago
Good article. Reminds me of the proverb that says that although the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, th second best time is today. If only I could remember to keep that point-of-view more often...
VLM 12y ago
"... saturated, bloated, overstuffed with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content ..." The article has a nice positive message, but it needs to be tempered with experience that railroads didn't go on being formed and expand forever in the 1890s, nor did car companies around 1910. Starting Tesla might be a good idea, but don't forget Delorean and Yugo, and 80s home computers, and early 80s video games. I'm not claiming the opposite negative view is correct (unlike the article's claim about that the positive view is correct). The negative view is worth considering. Also among readers who know about the above argument, some acknowledgement that the opposition exists might make the article more persuasive.
- meowface 12y ago
  You make a good point, but I think it's clear that the Internet and HTTP will be here to stay for a long time. It's just a matter of creating something that adds real value.
  - VLM 12y ago
    Correct. Note: US centric dates: My point being that starting up a railroad in 1850 was a great idea, not so good by 1900. Or there were about 150 startup automobile mfgrs around 1900, not quite so many by 1925. Starting up a telephone company in 1900, good idea, in 1950, not so good idea. We still have railroads and car mfgrs and telcos in 2014, they're just not realistic startup fields. Every other field of recent human activity has gone thru the same stages of startup success, startup failures/consolidations, oligopoly oscillating with semi-regulated public utility, sometimes a long term decline in the industry after that. Someday its economically inevitable that "Internet and HTTP" will not be the place to do startups. I don't think its today, but my grand kids are highly unlikely to be doing internet startups.
hemaljshah 12y ago
Great motivational read for budding or aspiring entrepreneurs. The one point I'd add to the article is to start viewing the world as a solver because we have more tools to fix and build better solutions than we did 30 years ago.
phreeza 12y ago
The funny thing about the Wired article they mention [0] is that it first ridicules McDonalds for being so tech-unsavy, and in the very next sentece suggests Burger King register a domain name containing an underscore... [0] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.htm...
- pllbnk 12y ago
  If there actually existed domain names with underscores, probably many casual internet users wouldn't know how to type them.
  - evmar 12y ago
    I think phreeza's point was that underscores aren't allowed in host names. (Officially, at least. I feel like I've seen them work and then sometimes seen them not work.)
    - nilliams 12y ago
      Yep they flat out break stuff in IE at least. Cookie saving, for instance, simply won't work if the domain contains an underscore.
snide 12y ago
I tell this to people all the time. Usually my analogy is that working on the web now is like working on Television in the 60s. It's still early and while the medium might be defined, the delivery and the product never is.
jqm 12y ago
When the author is wearing gloves with cut off fingers* and poking around in the rubble of the post apocalyptic civilization looking for an iron bar suitable for fending off packs of wild dogs, I hope he remembers writing this article. Ok... that was a bit dark. But my point is... no one knows exactly what the future holds. I do expect he is somewhat correct and more advances are in store. But sometimes given the geopolitical and resource situation I become less confident of this as a certainty. *Post apocalypse characters must wear gloves with cut off fingers. See Mad Max and The Matrix for specific style references if you wish to make your own in preparation.
- zo1 12y ago
  I, too, have fear of the future. Specifically in terms of the unstable world we live in. In some regards we're very lucky in that certain things are much more difficult for the world to let happen, mostly due to the speed at which news (and outrage) travels. But, at the same time, I'm forced to admit that if it comes down to it, we really are very much powerless. This is specifically why I'm an anarcho-capitalist, as I believe that the state is the single most dangerous entity we can conceive of; and we've gone ahead and given it near-absolute control over our lives with what lately seems to be very little oversight. As an aside, the article is indeed quite motivating. No time like the present, I say.
grimtrigger 12y ago
I take issue with the comparison. The barriers to the internet were many times lower than the current round of innovations (3d printing, virtual reality). The only thing that comes close is bitcoin and the relative cheapness lasted only a few years.
- dangoor 12y ago
  The barriers were still high back then, but they were different barriers. Bandwidth, CPU and storage all cost a lot more than they do now, and the tools available were less sophisticated. Building an online store or CMS back then was a much bigger piece of work. Today, you don't need to focus on those kinds of problems, generally. The problems are the next level up.
rdl 12y ago
How we access the internet has changed (mobile, smartphones, pervasive broadband), and businesses effectively provide great services connected to the Internet (Amazon in particular), but for me, the only real changes other than those from ~1992 to today are mixed: 1) Lots more people on the Internet 2) Lower barrier to access Sure, it's prettier, but USENET, IRC, etc. basically covered what we do with the Internet today. USENET was still technically superior to most discussion tools today; the web was a big step backward overall until the mid/late 200Xs, vs. native clients.
- spindritf 12y ago
  USENET was still technically superior to most discussion tools today I'd go even further and say it's still superior to all of them. So is IRC.
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    Not sure what newsgroups you use these days, but every one I ever made use of has turned into a cesspool of spam and low value content. Usenet has been dead for at least 5+ years for me - there was a 4 year period where my fingers had memorized every shortcut available to nn...
    - spindritf 12y ago
      Yeah, it's dead all right but still technically superior. It was Reddit but distributed, with more features, and better UI. IRC is alive though. And it seems to be even seeing a bit of a resurgence. It's certainly more pleasant to use than proprietary communicators.
    - rjsw 12y ago
      I read a selection of comp. newsgroups every day, any spam is filtered out before I see it.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Couldn't disagree with you more. To name just a dozen new internet things from the last 10 years that I did not have in 1990s. o Google o Wikipedia o Netflix o iTunes o Spotify/Pandora o Stack Exchange/Overflow o RSS (Google Reader/Feedly/etc..) o GitHub o Facebook o Instagram o Whatsapp o Gmail o Google Earth/Maps. I can only imagine what the next dozen new categories will be invented in the next 15 years.
FLUX-YOU 12y ago
>You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!” It's a bit easy to imagine once something's already survived it. A device with a hundred sensors probably survived hundreds or thousands of failed released or unreleased iterations. Every other mature field has probably gone through this same sentiment (and maybe still going through it, and perhaps will always go through it). If only astronomers today could imagine what new, novel techniques are just lying right in front of them with all of this computing power and automated manufacturing ability. Imagine how much further ahead astronomers would be in 2044 if they had discovered thingamajig back in 2014 instead of 2040! I think the greybeards of 2044 would be a bit biased. But this feels like we'd be backpedaling on choosing the right tool for the right job. Slapping AI onto something and watching it fail is great for our knowledge, but not our wallets. This is when business leaders create friction with development. This is where you get "Just make it work" commands which gets the snowball of technical debt rolling. The value gained is "This solution sucked in reality! Or maybe we just sucked delivering it! Don't do what we did unless you have a good reason!", but that's not what we're really after, is it? We could sit around and brute force a bunch of combinations of ideas and markets, I guess. And finally, if it was true back in 1985 with domain names, and it's true today with AI and the cloud, why wouldn't it be true for 2044 with VR contact lenses and holodecks? It seems like the future will be like then and now in this regard. So.. there will always be a wide open frontier somewhere? Do we really say anything substantial by saying "Today's an open frontier for internet ideas!" I think there's a lot less low-hanging fruit than this article might have us believe.
- bittercynic 12y ago
  The amount of low-hanging fruit available is at least partially dependent on how tall you are.
  - linker3000 12y ago
    ...and the number of patents/patent trolls waiting in the wings.
DodgyEggplant 12y ago
You are not too old either
badman_ting 12y ago
Probably correct. But, it doesn't feel that way.
r_singh 12y ago
> Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier! Maybe the rest of the article is making it sound simpler than it is. But I couldn't agree with the above lines more.
woodchuck64 12y ago
Had to find out what eventually happened with Quittner/McDonalds.com: "Quittner did indeed offer the name back to McDonald's in one of his magazine columns, but not in exchange for money. In a manner reminiscent of the Princeton Review, he instead offered to surrender the domain name if McDonald's corporation would underwrite some Internet equipment for a grade school. This and other provoking articles caught the corporation's attention; they responded not by funding grade school computer access, but by pressuring the InterNIC to revoke Quittner's registration of the name. Although the registry had stayed out of previous disputes such as the Adam Curry litigation, sticking tenaciously to its "first-come, first-served" policy, it wavered before this new corporate threat. InterNIC first resisted McDonalds' demands, then eventually agreed to revoke the registration, then changed its mind again, leaving the registration with Quittner. McDonald's ultimately agreed to donate $3,500 to purchase the equipment." From http://jolt.richmond.edu/v1i1/burk.html http://jolt.richmond.edu/v1i1/burk.html
- narag 12y ago
  Would that nasty move be acceptable today for McDonalds? The Internet has changed some things.
  - dkuntz2 12y ago
    Yes? That's basically what large corporations do today... Nissan (the car company) is still working to get nissan.com, and they're almost exclusively attempting to do it through legal means instead of negotiating with the current owner.
    - narag 12y ago
      What is acceptable for some companies is not for other companies.
spoolphiz 12y ago
The argument made here is flawed. There is still plenty of "low hanging fruit" today but the cost/barrier of entry is significantly higher than it was in the early days. "People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the internet" Seems to me like even if developing a holodeck is looked at as an iterative process comprised of many small innovations it's still a lot more daunting and less feasible for a small team to do than building an online book store in the 90s. With that said the internet is obviously in its infancy and the opportunities now are indeed boundless.
Superbloop 12y ago
I love this article. But honestly, I think we make an important and incorrect assumption- we try to revolutionise by evolution. Why put smartphones on your wrist or your head and call it a revolution? Why make an app that is a Tinder or a Wikipedia or a Google for something else and call it a revolution? The real revolutions are going to be things that havent been thought of yet, in any manner. In the meanwhile, we have this hyper-accelerated evolution- lets focus on lowering the barriers for entry...
jehna1 12y ago
There is no such thing as "the low-hanging fruit". The year is 1982. Rodney Mullen just managed to perform the world's first "Ollie" skateboarding trick, that can be count as somewhat the start of the modern day street skateboarding. What now is the most junior skateboarding trick (with available equipment, training etc.) was not a low-hanging fruit back then. While looking back, you can easily learn the trick by imitating; but back then there was no-one to learn it from. You had to go trial-and-error a sh*tload of times before making the first trick. Of course it looks sooo low-hanging fruit now. With current equipment and support. But you have to realise that the tools and methods came afterwards, to support the original invention. But looking the time back then, you had none of the aids. Just you, climbing to that tall tree to grab the apple and plant the seeds so everyone else could grab the fruits from smaller trees.

134 points by applecore 12y ago

I remember having McDonalds.com in a shopping cart, ready to buy it. It was 1993 and I wasn't sure if it was worth $35 per year - I expected I would get sued. I chickened out, and didn't buy any dot com domain names, and went back to my business at the time that had nothing to do with tech. I also chickened out from buying any other domain name until 1999. So one of my life regrets is that I didn't buy a whole lot of domain names in 1993 when I first looked at them. A few millions in income missed.....

kordless 12y ago
You were afraid to do it. The sale of the domain later for a large amount of money resolved that fear inside you, only leaving the desire to have bought it. This is regret defined. While it serves a purpose in our lives in teaching a lesson, it makes very little logical sense to wish for a future scenario where you are less afraid, or more intent without considering the reasons why you were to begin with. To avoid regret, realize and accept you are going to make mistakes. To avoid regret, face your fears when they are presented to you. The choice to do what scares you the most is the single most important ability you have in controlling your fate in this universe.
- meowface 12y ago
  What would stop McDonalds from suing him if he refused to relinquish the domain name for free? Couldn't they claim it was trademark infringement? Edit: Changed "copyright" to "trademark".
  - UweSchmidt 12y ago
    Back then things weren't as clear-cut and I believe a lot of money changed hands when corporations realized that they need their website right now.
    - pasbesoin 12y ago
      You can be too late, with respect to certain windows. For a while, people made significant money selling highly desired domain names, including to big companies. Now, those companies just "take them away" via trademark infringement claims. The legal structure for doing so has since been constructed and tested by them. One of my concerns is that more and more such windows are being closed. It's not the isolated case, but the overall trend towards a corporate and corporate state restricted "push" implementation. I.e. the end of "open".
      - meowface 12y ago
        I don't really see how disallowing people from registering a name already in use by a person or company goes against "openness". If you're using someone else's name, I think they're justified in trying to forcibly retake control of it.
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    > Couldn't they claim it was copyright infringement? No, though they could claim trademark infringement (which is an important difference). Trademarks can (but do not need to be) registered in order to be protected, and an unregistered trademark can trump a registered trademark if it precedes the registered one, if it is in a sufficiently different "category", if it is geographically distinct, or for a number of other reasons. One interesting example is the Burger King in Mattoon, Illinois[0]. The USPTO is very clear to note that registering a trademark is not a guarantee of validity of the trademark, and they do not issue refunds on the application if the trademark is successfully challenged and invalidated later. In this particular case he'd be less likely to win against McDonald's, especially if all he's doing is domain squatting.... but you never know - take a look at http://www.chaseonline.com http://www.chaseonline.com . [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_%28Mattoon,_Illinois%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_%28Mattoon,_Illino...

nemo1618 12y ago

thanks, I really needed this. I had similar feelings about computer hardware for years.

jonathanyc 12y ago

Good article. Reminds me of the proverb that says that although the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, th second best time is today. If only I could remember to keep that point-of-view more often...

VLM 12y ago

"... saturated, bloated, overstuffed with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content ..." The article has a nice positive message, but it needs to be tempered with experience that railroads didn't go on being formed and expand forever in the 1890s, nor did car companies around 1910. Starting Tesla might be a good idea, but don't forget Delorean and Yugo, and 80s home computers, and early 80s video games. I'm not claiming the opposite negative view is correct (unlike the article's claim about that the positive view is correct). The negative view is worth considering. Also among readers who know about the above argument, some acknowledgement that the opposition exists might make the article more persuasive.

meowface 12y ago
You make a good point, but I think it's clear that the Internet and HTTP will be here to stay for a long time. It's just a matter of creating something that adds real value.
- VLM 12y ago
  Correct. Note: US centric dates: My point being that starting up a railroad in 1850 was a great idea, not so good by 1900. Or there were about 150 startup automobile mfgrs around 1900, not quite so many by 1925. Starting up a telephone company in 1900, good idea, in 1950, not so good idea. We still have railroads and car mfgrs and telcos in 2014, they're just not realistic startup fields. Every other field of recent human activity has gone thru the same stages of startup success, startup failures/consolidations, oligopoly oscillating with semi-regulated public utility, sometimes a long term decline in the industry after that. Someday its economically inevitable that "Internet and HTTP" will not be the place to do startups. I don't think its today, but my grand kids are highly unlikely to be doing internet startups.

hemaljshah 12y ago

Great motivational read for budding or aspiring entrepreneurs. The one point I'd add to the article is to start viewing the world as a solver because we have more tools to fix and build better solutions than we did 30 years ago.

phreeza 12y ago

The funny thing about the Wired article they mention [0] is that it first ridicules McDonalds for being so tech-unsavy, and in the very next sentece suggests Burger King register a domain name containing an underscore... [0] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.htm...

pllbnk 12y ago
If there actually existed domain names with underscores, probably many casual internet users wouldn't know how to type them.
- evmar 12y ago
  I think phreeza's point was that underscores aren't allowed in host names. (Officially, at least. I feel like I've seen them work and then sometimes seen them not work.)
  - nilliams 12y ago
    Yep they flat out break stuff in IE at least. Cookie saving, for instance, simply won't work if the domain contains an underscore.

snide 12y ago

I tell this to people all the time. Usually my analogy is that working on the web now is like working on Television in the 60s. It's still early and while the medium might be defined, the delivery and the product never is.

jqm 12y ago

When the author is wearing gloves with cut off fingers* and poking around in the rubble of the post apocalyptic civilization looking for an iron bar suitable for fending off packs of wild dogs, I hope he remembers writing this article. Ok... that was a bit dark. But my point is... no one knows exactly what the future holds. I do expect he is somewhat correct and more advances are in store. But sometimes given the geopolitical and resource situation I become less confident of this as a certainty. *Post apocalypse characters must wear gloves with cut off fingers. See Mad Max and The Matrix for specific style references if you wish to make your own in preparation.

zo1 12y ago
I, too, have fear of the future. Specifically in terms of the unstable world we live in. In some regards we're very lucky in that certain things are much more difficult for the world to let happen, mostly due to the speed at which news (and outrage) travels. But, at the same time, I'm forced to admit that if it comes down to it, we really are very much powerless. This is specifically why I'm an anarcho-capitalist, as I believe that the state is the single most dangerous entity we can conceive of; and we've gone ahead and given it near-absolute control over our lives with what lately seems to be very little oversight. As an aside, the article is indeed quite motivating. No time like the present, I say.

grimtrigger 12y ago

I take issue with the comparison. The barriers to the internet were many times lower than the current round of innovations (3d printing, virtual reality). The only thing that comes close is bitcoin and the relative cheapness lasted only a few years.

dangoor 12y ago
The barriers were still high back then, but they were different barriers. Bandwidth, CPU and storage all cost a lot more than they do now, and the tools available were less sophisticated. Building an online store or CMS back then was a much bigger piece of work. Today, you don't need to focus on those kinds of problems, generally. The problems are the next level up.

rdl 12y ago

How we access the internet has changed (mobile, smartphones, pervasive broadband), and businesses effectively provide great services connected to the Internet (Amazon in particular), but for me, the only real changes other than those from ~1992 to today are mixed: 1) Lots more people on the Internet 2) Lower barrier to access Sure, it's prettier, but USENET, IRC, etc. basically covered what we do with the Internet today. USENET was still technically superior to most discussion tools today; the web was a big step backward overall until the mid/late 200Xs, vs. native clients.

spindritf 12y ago
USENET was still technically superior to most discussion tools today I'd go even further and say it's still superior to all of them. So is IRC.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Not sure what newsgroups you use these days, but every one I ever made use of has turned into a cesspool of spam and low value content. Usenet has been dead for at least 5+ years for me - there was a 4 year period where my fingers had memorized every shortcut available to nn...
  - spindritf 12y ago
    Yeah, it's dead all right but still technically superior. It was Reddit but distributed, with more features, and better UI. IRC is alive though. And it seems to be even seeing a bit of a resurgence. It's certainly more pleasant to use than proprietary communicators.
  - rjsw 12y ago
    I read a selection of comp. newsgroups every day, any spam is filtered out before I see it.
ghshephard 12y ago
Couldn't disagree with you more. To name just a dozen new internet things from the last 10 years that I did not have in 1990s. o Google o Wikipedia o Netflix o iTunes o Spotify/Pandora o Stack Exchange/Overflow o RSS (Google Reader/Feedly/etc..) o GitHub o Facebook o Instagram o Whatsapp o Gmail o Google Earth/Maps. I can only imagine what the next dozen new categories will be invented in the next 15 years.

FLUX-YOU 12y ago

>You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!” It's a bit easy to imagine once something's already survived it. A device with a hundred sensors probably survived hundreds or thousands of failed released or unreleased iterations. Every other mature field has probably gone through this same sentiment (and maybe still going through it, and perhaps will always go through it). If only astronomers today could imagine what new, novel techniques are just lying right in front of them with all of this computing power and automated manufacturing ability. Imagine how much further ahead astronomers would be in 2044 if they had discovered thingamajig back in 2014 instead of 2040! I think the greybeards of 2044 would be a bit biased. But this feels like we'd be backpedaling on choosing the right tool for the right job. Slapping AI onto something and watching it fail is great for our knowledge, but not our wallets. This is when business leaders create friction with development. This is where you get "Just make it work" commands which gets the snowball of technical debt rolling. The value gained is "This solution sucked in reality! Or maybe we just sucked delivering it! Don't do what we did unless you have a good reason!", but that's not what we're really after, is it? We could sit around and brute force a bunch of combinations of ideas and markets, I guess. And finally, if it was true back in 1985 with domain names, and it's true today with AI and the cloud, why wouldn't it be true for 2044 with VR contact lenses and holodecks? It seems like the future will be like then and now in this regard. So.. there will always be a wide open frontier somewhere? Do we really say anything substantial by saying "Today's an open frontier for internet ideas!" I think there's a lot less low-hanging fruit than this article might have us believe.

bittercynic 12y ago
The amount of low-hanging fruit available is at least partially dependent on how tall you are.
- linker3000 12y ago
  ...and the number of patents/patent trolls waiting in the wings.

DodgyEggplant 12y ago

You are not too old either

badman_ting 12y ago

Probably correct. But, it doesn't feel that way.

r_singh 12y ago

> Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier! Maybe the rest of the article is making it sound simpler than it is. But I couldn't agree with the above lines more.

woodchuck64 12y ago

Had to find out what eventually happened with Quittner/McDonalds.com: "Quittner did indeed offer the name back to McDonald's in one of his magazine columns, but not in exchange for money. In a manner reminiscent of the Princeton Review, he instead offered to surrender the domain name if McDonald's corporation would underwrite some Internet equipment for a grade school. This and other provoking articles caught the corporation's attention; they responded not by funding grade school computer access, but by pressuring the InterNIC to revoke Quittner's registration of the name. Although the registry had stayed out of previous disputes such as the Adam Curry litigation, sticking tenaciously to its "first-come, first-served" policy, it wavered before this new corporate threat. InterNIC first resisted McDonalds' demands, then eventually agreed to revoke the registration, then changed its mind again, leaving the registration with Quittner. McDonald's ultimately agreed to donate $3,500 to purchase the equipment." From http://jolt.richmond.edu/v1i1/burk.html http://jolt.richmond.edu/v1i1/burk.html

narag 12y ago
Would that nasty move be acceptable today for McDonalds? The Internet has changed some things.
- dkuntz2 12y ago
  Yes? That's basically what large corporations do today... Nissan (the car company) is still working to get nissan.com, and they're almost exclusively attempting to do it through legal means instead of negotiating with the current owner.
  - narag 12y ago
    What is acceptable for some companies is not for other companies.

spoolphiz 12y ago

The argument made here is flawed. There is still plenty of "low hanging fruit" today but the cost/barrier of entry is significantly higher than it was in the early days. "People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the internet" Seems to me like even if developing a holodeck is looked at as an iterative process comprised of many small innovations it's still a lot more daunting and less feasible for a small team to do than building an online book store in the 90s. With that said the internet is obviously in its infancy and the opportunities now are indeed boundless.

Superbloop 12y ago

I love this article. But honestly, I think we make an important and incorrect assumption- we try to revolutionise by evolution. Why put smartphones on your wrist or your head and call it a revolution? Why make an app that is a Tinder or a Wikipedia or a Google for something else and call it a revolution? The real revolutions are going to be things that havent been thought of yet, in any manner. In the meanwhile, we have this hyper-accelerated evolution- lets focus on lowering the barriers for entry...

jehna1 12y ago

There is no such thing as "the low-hanging fruit". The year is 1982. Rodney Mullen just managed to perform the world's first "Ollie" skateboarding trick, that can be count as somewhat the start of the modern day street skateboarding. What now is the most junior skateboarding trick (with available equipment, training etc.) was not a low-hanging fruit back then. While looking back, you can easily learn the trick by imitating; but back then there was no-one to learn it from. You had to go trial-and-error a sh*tload of times before making the first trick. Of course it looks sooo low-hanging fruit now. With current equipment and support. But you have to realise that the tools and methods came afterwards, to support the original invention. But looking the time back then, you had none of the aids. Just you, climbing to that tall tree to grab the apple and plant the seeds so everyone else could grab the fruits from smaller trees.