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Ten years ago? Not sure. I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls over my GSM phone, chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc. Literally not

by stonogo 12y ago

Ten years ago? Not sure. I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls over my GSM phone, chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc. Literally nothing in this post is in any way amazing to anyone who actually remembers life ten years ago. We had smartphones. We had social media. We had web forums. Just because you've dumped money into some of them doesn't make them special or even interesting from a technology standpoint. I, too, support SpaceX (as well as Orbital Sciences, Virgin Galactic, etc) but pretending that reddit is even anywhere near that list as far as being "unimaginably fantastic" is either depressingly credulous or else clumsy false optimism. Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing; all the brands names he's slinging around amount to a celebration of the black-boxing of internet services. Ten years ago I could do all this stuff without needing a quad-core 2GHz phone to run a full-featured HTML5/CSS/JS browser platform. More generally, in cars, computers, and most other sectors in technology, things are getting less and less accessible to casual interest or even moderately-dedicated hobbyists. Sometimes it's in the name of efficiency, sometimes it's in the name of corporate control, but with the exception of the Tesla, everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form. It was just easier to learn the internals, then, when programs were programs, instead of HTTP APIs, and circuits were circuits, instead of closely-held intellectual properties. When was the last time anyone bought an appliance of any sort that had the wiring diagram pasted to the inside of the case? Sorry Sam, things are prettier now, but there's nothing new under the sun.

lordbusiness 12y ago
I agree with this whole-heartedly. I was doing video conferencing on my iLamp in 2002, I worked remotely and globally since 1994, my Nokia phone paired over Bluetooth to my computer long ago, things are pretty certainly, but I'm not seeing massive innovation in day to day computing. I am weary of the clichéd argument against someone who speaks about an app being badly made or complains about a computer crashing. It always goes something like "you know everyone moans about how limiting this technology is, failing to realize how amazing our world is now" and I just want to scream every time I hear this empty and self-important pseudo critique being dolled out by some vapid hipster-esque person. When I know how rock solid my computer was a few years ago, and know how easy it is to make software that doesn't crash or cause data loss, I am entitled to make a comment about sloppy apps and buggy operating systems. In fact, it's my duty to in the hope that someone thinks twice about how they make something. Yes, our current world is good. But it could be a lot better, and it's not whining to say so.
cwilson 12y ago
I think the major difference is now everyone is doing those things, not just the minority of us who knew how or cared enough to figure it out. So maybe the innovation is the refinement of all of these technologies that made them so accessible.
- danieldk 12y ago
  ...and closed to one ecosystem. E.g., Google and Facebook took XMPP and killed most of its good properties (federation). It's that e-mail was already to widespread, or we would be using disjunct mailing systems.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- danieldk 12y ago
  Maybe you were able to stream music from virtually any performer 10 years ago (probably illegally), [...] - but those things were out of reach for the general public. That's definitely not true, many of my non-tech friends were using Napster and later Bittorrent. Also, ICQ was popular among the general public in the nineties. Many people were already on social networks, e.g. Hyves had millions of users in The Netherlands. I think the most radical change the last ten years is that mobile devices have advanced extremely hardware-wise and UI-wise over the last 10 years (initially pushed by Apple). The applications themselves are not so revolutionary.
- codemac 12y ago
  "Technical innovation" has been redefined to mean a much lower bar of novelty. And business / commercial novelty is not technical novelty, though I realize that may be hard for the ycombinator gang to agree with.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- rgbrenner 12y ago
  Napster: 1999 Rhapsody: 2001 Very much accessible to the average user
  - jonnynezbo 12y ago
    You're right. That part of my comment is wrong.
danieldk 12y ago
Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing; all the brands names he's slinging around amount to a celebration of the black-boxing of internet services. Ten years ago I could do all this stuff without needing a quad-core 2GHz phone to run a full-featured HTML5/CSS/JS browser platform. I fully agree. Ten years ago, I was chatting using XMPP without any problems on a Pentium II or III machine. SIP was the new kid on the block at the time and gave interoperable voice chats. Now I am messaging with disparate groups over Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, and Whatsapp, because none of the systems are compatible. Ten years ago, there was still genuine optimism that Linux was making inroads on the desktop. Ubuntu was just getting started and things were getting better all the time. Now we have two major systems that run on the most popular devices (phones and tablets) and while they are built on open systems (Linux plus BSD and Mach plus BSD), they are nearly closed for the general consumer, with locked boot loaders rather than BIOSes than run any operating system. Of course, there are good things like the Raspberry Pi, that still allow newer generations to tinker and not get locked into incompatible ecosystems, however that is more despite the assault on general-purpose computing.
sama 12y ago
The key difference here now is that billions of people are doing these things and there are emergent behaviors from the ubiquity that are powerful.
- pron 12y ago
  Sure, but that's not technological innovation, but mere gradual evolution. Things were moving a lot faster in the nineties and the oughts. I think most people who remember the advances in computing in the nineties feel that we're in a technological slump. We hoped that with more people going into computing things would speed up, but that hasn't happened. That's not necessarily anyone's fault, though. Maybe the low-hanging fruit had already been picked.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    I can remember the early 90s. I think the feeling then was very similar. We had a number of technologies that were cool, but didn't work right. Think WebTV, PDAs, speech recognition, OCR, virtual reality. We also had continual evolution in the price/performance of PCs. I remember all the IBM clones - seemingly a new vendor was popping up every couple months, and they all had dozens of models available. Even Apple was drowning in continuous, gradual improvements - this is when they numbered all of their products. Remember the Centris 660AV, Powerbook 520/c, or Power Macintosh 9500? I think we're seeing the same effect now. Existing technologies are being gradually refined. The price of cloud computing is falling through the floor. Those industries where the building-blocks are open (notably web startups & mobile apps) face a deluge of small-time competitors. Those where it's closed (search, mobile OSes, hardware) face a number of small incremental improvements. And on the horizon you have a number of exciting technologies that are far away from commercialization (SpaceX, self-driving cars, Bitcoin, 3D printing, wearables, VR...still). I bet that the next big thing is being worked on in someone's garage or living room right now, and it's probably nothing we've heard of. The WWW came out of nowhere in 1995. Except it didn't - it built on TCP/IP (1973), DNS (1983), the personal computer (1975), and graphical user interfaces (1984). If you read Kuhn, he describes the history of science as long periods of gradual refinement of theories ("normal science"), punctuated by overthrows of the established scientific consensus ("paradigm shifts"). Tech is much the same. It's been a long time since we had a paradigm shift, but that doesn't mean that it'll never happen again. Rather, it may mean that there's fertile ground for one to happen now. The one caution is that very often, paradigm shifts don't look like paradigm shifts to people inside the old order. They look like trivial toys, because they grow out of small experiments within the existing paradigm. Scientifically, it usually takes a whole generation for new paradigms to take root, because the old guard of existing scientists never considers them important - they have to die off before the new paradigm replaces the old. The same thing happened with webapps - old-school mainframe and desktop programmers considered them trivial toys - and it may be happening with mobile. So, something for all the folks on HN who say there's been no technological progress - has there actually been none, or are we just the dinosaurs who're out of touch with what kids these days are using?
pron 12y ago
What I find amusing is how Silicon Valley's hubris grows inversely with its achievements (and everybody mentions Tesla and SpaceX, but they're clear outliers): Back when people built Intel and all the way through Google, they knew they were advancing technology -- and changing the world through technology -- but that's pretty much where their aspirations ended. Now when people build Snapchat, there's talk of changing the world's currency and seceding from the US, as if Uber and Groupon were the missing pieces to figuring out whatever there was left to understanding how the world works, and now SV can take over. Obviously, I'm exaggerating. People have always built toys, and it's always hard to understand what's important and what isn't. But the culture -- or religion, if we wish -- around computer technology is new (or at least at an expansionary stage). I think there's more of a political[1] change in SV than a technological one. [1]: In the sense of how society is viewed, and how the powers that comprise it are understood and manipulated.
- mercer 12y ago
  It's a good point, and it remains to be seen how we'll look back at the 'achievements' of current Silicon Valley. That said, I don't think the hubris is entirely unwarranted. I consider myself generally too much of a skeptic of new things, and yet I quite regularly marvel at what's happening. It's not that the things coming out of Silicon Valley are hugely innovative, but rather, as others have also pointed out, the growing ubiquity of all this stuff, and not just in the West. Perhaps a lot of the sentiment that often seems like hubris is really vindication and excitement: vindication because all the stuff we early-adopters loved and that others didn't understand (or even made fun of) is now used by everyone, and excitement because it means there's a market for the stuff we've been working with for so long. Perhaps the younger among us are mostly excited by what they see as new possibilities and what are, to them, new discoveries. For example, I remember making a game for Windows and I remember how excited I was that my parents and even some colleagues were playing it! I even put the game on floppies and printed my logo on it. Now, I'm teaching my younger brother programming by building the same game. The first difference this time around is that we're using javascript and HTML/CSS. In one day I set up the basic project with him that he can push to heroku and immediately show to friends and the world, and in about two weeks he worked through a number of CodeSchools lessons and has access to vastly more resources than I do. I feel happy and vindicated, in way, that my weird hobby is now practiced by someone who is not very nerdy, and my brother is getting excited about all the stuff he can imagine building and releasing into the wild. No need to buy floppies and hand out his game: it's instantly accessible to everyone with internet and a browser. Now this is just one example. Consider also the access to all kinds of roboty goodness that can be programmed with the same javascript, the fact that there's a huge potential paying audience through various app stores, and the huge (but probably rather unattainable) carrot of making the next Flappy Bird or whatnot.
wildermuthn 12y ago
> I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls over my GSM phone, chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc. As an early-adopter with sufficient income to afford whatever gadget you're talking about, I'm sure you found a lot of utility communicating with the <1% of our population that shared your position and enthusiasm. The other 99% of us had land-lines. Only some of us had the internet. > Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing I have no idea what you're talking about. Our society is now saturated with computers. We carry computers in our pockets that we casually call 'smart'. These devices are wirelessly connected in a global network that we casually call 'the internet'. Computing is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it anymore. > Sorry Sam, things are prettier now, but there's nothing new under the sun . . . everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form. Yes, the retina display existed in some form: in low-contrast PDA displays. Yes, 4G and 100mps broadband existed in some form: as in, dial-up screeching. Yes, Reddit existed in some form, as in your local BBS. Sometimes difference of degree are so great that they become differences of kind, precisely because they make further technological innovations possible. Any startup that hinges upon "network-effects" knows this. Anyone who's used an Oculus Rift has experienced it. There's nothing new under the sun? Only if you're living in the past.
- untog 12y ago
  There's nothing new under the sun? I don't think anyone is suggesting that nothing is new. Just that nothing is mind-blowingly new. As you say, the last ten years have seen a lot of improvements in existing concepts - connections are faster, displays are better, etc. etc. But that's not the kind of mind blowing change Sam suggests that it is. If you had told me ten years ago that tech would look like it does today I would say "yep, sounds about right".
  - wildermuthn 12y ago
    I think the Oculus Rift is certainly mind-blowing. Also the fact that I can work remotely effectively. Thinking on this further, the difference between 10 years and 20 years is immense: 2004 vs 1994. Maybe we just need another 10 years to see how far we've really come since 2004. We are only just beginning to experience what happens when you connect the global population wirelessly.
retrogradeMT 12y ago
One major innovation that has occurred over the past decade has been the distribution of technology that was only available to a lucky few. Over the last decade tech has had a major impact on the daily lives of people like me. Today I can work from anywhere and communicate with everyone I know at any time of day, while 10 years ago I didn't have internet fast enough to watch a youtube video. iPhones weren't even sold in my state until 2008 (I might be off by a year in either direction).
austenallred 12y ago
Honestly, hackers/HN may be the wrong audience to ask this rhetorical question to (not that Sam was specifically asking it to us). The biggest difference of the last 10 years isn't so much the incredible new technology or protocols being built, it's how accessible those are to the everyday person, and how much easier they are to use. Look at the original HN submission for Dropbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863). The response from a lot of hackers was negative. Why? "We already have rsync." "We have FTP mounted locally with curlftpfs, with SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem + open source tools." That problem was already solved for hackers. But for the 99% of people who aren't hackers, seamlessly sharing files across computers (with backups and a sort of version control built in) was incredible. There are certainly technologies I love and adore that didn't exist 10 years ago (Twitter, everything being mobile, Uber/Lyft). But what I can do is largely unchanged. For someone who doesn't build things or understand github or use a terminal, however, the world has been revolutionized. Chris Dixon has pointed out that a lot of the great companies of today are Unix commands made accessible to the everyday person. (Grep->Google, rsync->Dropbox, man->stack overflow, cron->IFTTT). Some are a bit of a stretch (Google != Grep), but an interesting way to think about starting big companies is to think of something really cool or useful that only hackers can do right now. So, going back to Sam's question, "What was I doing 10 years ago?" It was pretty close to the same. I use almost all of the technologies he mentions, but could probably get by without them. For me, it's much more interesting to consider the question, "What was your mom doing 10 years ago?"
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Making something complex easy is an excellent way to start a business. Convenience is a huge driver and dropbox managed to keep it simple (at considerable cost in blood, sweat and tears no doubt). Hiding complexity is hard, doing it well is harder still.
- misiti3780 12y ago
  that chris dixon analogy is really interesting ... can you provide a link if you get a chance? EDIT: nevermind it was only a tweet :) https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/505118160811728896 https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/505118160811728896
untog 12y ago
I agree, to a point. But the thing that gets me is the passage where he says: I think it’s remarkable how much of what people do and use today didn’t exist 10 years ago. But all he lists above is apps. Yeah, sure, WhatsApp didn't exist ten years ago. But SMS did. Dropbox didn't, but PhotoBucket did. And so on, and so on. There's been a lot of change, but focusing on the kind of consumer apps that barely ever last a decade isn't a good way of highlighting it. Our interactions are still very similar to their ten year old equivalents, we just have different colour schemed apps to do them with.
- nilkn 12y ago
  > WhatsApp didn't exist ten years ago. But SMS did. SMS was barely accessible to most of the world and was often unaffordable when it was. It's easy to write off WhatsApp as just another app, but it was a vastly better solution for huge chunks of the planet than SMS ever was.
  - untog 12y ago
    > SMS was barely accessible to most of the world and was often unaffordable when it was Sure. But everyone got SMS before they got data (and Whatsapp).
    - nilkn 12y ago
      Wi-Fi? Besides, what exactly is your point? People might have had access to SMS first, but it wasn't a good solution for much of the world. It seems to me that you're trying to argue that we haven't made much real progress in the past decade and that you're trivializing WhatsApp in order to support that point. It seems to me that you're focusing entirely too much on the longevity of specific apps and not looking at the changes that those apps actually represent. As for Dropbox, it's sort of like the iPod of cloud hosting services. Yes, hosting services like Photobucket existed. They were mostly bad and slow and hard-to-use and special-purpose and didn't offer much free storage.
      - untog 12y ago
logfromblammo 12y ago
If I agreed with this any more, I might sprain something. Fifteen years ago, I worked for a company that wrote software in Java, targeted at mobile phone users (one that would fail and be acquired within the following year). I did most of my shopping on-line. All of my friends could be contacted via instant messengers, phone, or e-mail. I could argue with strangers on bulletin boards. If I were more garrulous, I could have published a personal blog. There are very few things that have changed for me between then and now: 1. More of the bandwidth I consume is over wires, instead of via optical discs sent through the post or carried by hand. Netflix, Amazon, Steam, and GOG have largely replaced... Netflix and Amazon. Hmmm. 2. I am charged more for paid services. I also note that the quality of these services is often not substantially improved since then; they merely represent a larger share of my budget. 3. I am more concerned about my privacy. Companies are still as sloppy about protecting it as they ever were; they just collect and keep more information about us. 4. DRM schemes are more pervasive and annoying. Casual copyright infringement is easier than ever. 5. My video card can push out more hi-res triangles at 60 fps. 6. My oldest still-in-use computer is 6 years older, and is more likely to be replaced due to its relatively high power draw than its inability to run newer software. The last 15 years have been a predictable series of minor improvements on existing technologies, enabled largely by cheaper and more capable hardware, and pushed out to a progressively larger audience. This has been accompanied by aggressive attempts to squeeze more blood out of drier stones. 10 years ago, Sam's question would have appeared as a link on Slashdot, and parent post would be (+5, Insightful). There might even be meme images circulating of a caveman with caption "Facebook? // I do cave painting of my lunch 8000 year ago".
S4M 12y ago
I couldn't agree more with your comments: the innovations sama mentions are just shiny copies of what existed ten years ago, or maybe more - with a few exceptions. This article is pretty depressing, since what he is saying is in essence "we created lots of innovation in the last ten years, and now we are going to change the world even more, because we are investing in energy and biotech". Now the innovation, as you say, if pretty artificial, and the two companies that are worth the more in YC portfolio are one that is semi illegally disrupting hotels (there are reasons why it's forbidden to transform your flat into an hotel room) and another one that built a wrapper around rsync. I'm from Europe, and the view I have from the SV is more a bunch of hipster programmers with macbooks building social networks to share cat pictures, than a center of technical innovation, and sadly, this post is not making me change my mind. I do hope to be proven wrong.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  One reason it is a little depressing is because many of the technological innovations in the beginning were not driven by consumer needs but were results of actual research initiatives led by some pretty smart folks. I'm specifically thinking of PARC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_%28company%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_%28company%29) and there is obviously a bit of a creation myth kind of setup going on but the general gist remains valid.
cenhyperion 12y ago
You're confusing invention and innovation. Invention is the creation of a new product or category. Innovation is improving upon that and making it better and more accessible. Internet forums or instant messaging were inventions. Reddit and whatsapp were innovations. The technology may have been there 10 years ago, but it was nowhere near as robust, user friendly, scalable, well designed, or good. Thus, the majority of Americans didn't use the technology. Sam isn't arguing that those are new inventions, he's arguing that they're innovations that have spread the technology to the average consumer. > but with the exception of the Tesla, everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form Electric cars have existed since the late 1800s. Everything is innovation.
dzuc 12y ago
'The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed'... etc.
- dismal2 12y ago
  if the future is instagram and twitter, you can keep it
  - yawaramin 12y ago
    You mean the ability to instantly and virally let people all over the world know about events happening in your country/region/neighborhood? Yeah thanks, we'll keep it.
yawaramin 12y ago
E-money and mobile internet on cell phones in developing countries. It's literally changed the lives of entire populations throughout the developing world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

by stonogo 12y ago

lordbusiness 12y ago

I agree with this whole-heartedly. I was doing video conferencing on my iLamp in 2002, I worked remotely and globally since 1994, my Nokia phone paired over Bluetooth to my computer long ago, things are pretty certainly, but I'm not seeing massive innovation in day to day computing. I am weary of the clichéd argument against someone who speaks about an app being badly made or complains about a computer crashing. It always goes something like "you know everyone moans about how limiting this technology is, failing to realize how amazing our world is now" and I just want to scream every time I hear this empty and self-important pseudo critique being dolled out by some vapid hipster-esque person. When I know how rock solid my computer was a few years ago, and know how easy it is to make software that doesn't crash or cause data loss, I am entitled to make a comment about sloppy apps and buggy operating systems. In fact, it's my duty to in the hope that someone thinks twice about how they make something. Yes, our current world is good. But it could be a lot better, and it's not whining to say so.

cwilson 12y ago

I think the major difference is now everyone is doing those things, not just the minority of us who knew how or cared enough to figure it out. So maybe the innovation is the refinement of all of these technologies that made them so accessible.

danieldk 12y ago
...and closed to one ecosystem. E.g., Google and Facebook took XMPP and killed most of its good properties (federation). It's that e-mail was already to widespread, or we would be using disjunct mailing systems.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

danieldk 12y ago
Maybe you were able to stream music from virtually any performer 10 years ago (probably illegally), [...] - but those things were out of reach for the general public. That's definitely not true, many of my non-tech friends were using Napster and later Bittorrent. Also, ICQ was popular among the general public in the nineties. Many people were already on social networks, e.g. Hyves had millions of users in The Netherlands. I think the most radical change the last ten years is that mobile devices have advanced extremely hardware-wise and UI-wise over the last 10 years (initially pushed by Apple). The applications themselves are not so revolutionary.
codemac 12y ago
"Technical innovation" has been redefined to mean a much lower bar of novelty. And business / commercial novelty is not technical novelty, though I realize that may be hard for the ycombinator gang to agree with.
deleted 12y ago
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rgbrenner 12y ago
Napster: 1999 Rhapsody: 2001 Very much accessible to the average user
- jonnynezbo 12y ago
  You're right. That part of my comment is wrong.

danieldk 12y ago

Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing; all the brands names he's slinging around amount to a celebration of the black-boxing of internet services. Ten years ago I could do all this stuff without needing a quad-core 2GHz phone to run a full-featured HTML5/CSS/JS browser platform. I fully agree. Ten years ago, I was chatting using XMPP without any problems on a Pentium II or III machine. SIP was the new kid on the block at the time and gave interoperable voice chats. Now I am messaging with disparate groups over Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, and Whatsapp, because none of the systems are compatible. Ten years ago, there was still genuine optimism that Linux was making inroads on the desktop. Ubuntu was just getting started and things were getting better all the time. Now we have two major systems that run on the most popular devices (phones and tablets) and while they are built on open systems (Linux plus BSD and Mach plus BSD), they are nearly closed for the general consumer, with locked boot loaders rather than BIOSes than run any operating system. Of course, there are good things like the Raspberry Pi, that still allow newer generations to tinker and not get locked into incompatible ecosystems, however that is more despite the assault on general-purpose computing.

sama 12y ago

The key difference here now is that billions of people are doing these things and there are emergent behaviors from the ubiquity that are powerful.

pron 12y ago
Sure, but that's not technological innovation, but mere gradual evolution. Things were moving a lot faster in the nineties and the oughts. I think most people who remember the advances in computing in the nineties feel that we're in a technological slump. We hoped that with more people going into computing things would speed up, but that hasn't happened. That's not necessarily anyone's fault, though. Maybe the low-hanging fruit had already been picked.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  I can remember the early 90s. I think the feeling then was very similar. We had a number of technologies that were cool, but didn't work right. Think WebTV, PDAs, speech recognition, OCR, virtual reality. We also had continual evolution in the price/performance of PCs. I remember all the IBM clones - seemingly a new vendor was popping up every couple months, and they all had dozens of models available. Even Apple was drowning in continuous, gradual improvements - this is when they numbered all of their products. Remember the Centris 660AV, Powerbook 520/c, or Power Macintosh 9500? I think we're seeing the same effect now. Existing technologies are being gradually refined. The price of cloud computing is falling through the floor. Those industries where the building-blocks are open (notably web startups & mobile apps) face a deluge of small-time competitors. Those where it's closed (search, mobile OSes, hardware) face a number of small incremental improvements. And on the horizon you have a number of exciting technologies that are far away from commercialization (SpaceX, self-driving cars, Bitcoin, 3D printing, wearables, VR...still). I bet that the next big thing is being worked on in someone's garage or living room right now, and it's probably nothing we've heard of. The WWW came out of nowhere in 1995. Except it didn't - it built on TCP/IP (1973), DNS (1983), the personal computer (1975), and graphical user interfaces (1984). If you read Kuhn, he describes the history of science as long periods of gradual refinement of theories ("normal science"), punctuated by overthrows of the established scientific consensus ("paradigm shifts"). Tech is much the same. It's been a long time since we had a paradigm shift, but that doesn't mean that it'll never happen again. Rather, it may mean that there's fertile ground for one to happen now. The one caution is that very often, paradigm shifts don't look like paradigm shifts to people inside the old order. They look like trivial toys, because they grow out of small experiments within the existing paradigm. Scientifically, it usually takes a whole generation for new paradigms to take root, because the old guard of existing scientists never considers them important - they have to die off before the new paradigm replaces the old. The same thing happened with webapps - old-school mainframe and desktop programmers considered them trivial toys - and it may be happening with mobile. So, something for all the folks on HN who say there's been no technological progress - has there actually been none, or are we just the dinosaurs who're out of touch with what kids these days are using?

pron 12y ago

What I find amusing is how Silicon Valley's hubris grows inversely with its achievements (and everybody mentions Tesla and SpaceX, but they're clear outliers): Back when people built Intel and all the way through Google, they knew they were advancing technology -- and changing the world through technology -- but that's pretty much where their aspirations ended. Now when people build Snapchat, there's talk of changing the world's currency and seceding from the US, as if Uber and Groupon were the missing pieces to figuring out whatever there was left to understanding how the world works, and now SV can take over. Obviously, I'm exaggerating. People have always built toys, and it's always hard to understand what's important and what isn't. But the culture -- or religion, if we wish -- around computer technology is new (or at least at an expansionary stage). I think there's more of a political[1] change in SV than a technological one. [1]: In the sense of how society is viewed, and how the powers that comprise it are understood and manipulated.

mercer 12y ago
It's a good point, and it remains to be seen how we'll look back at the 'achievements' of current Silicon Valley. That said, I don't think the hubris is entirely unwarranted. I consider myself generally too much of a skeptic of new things, and yet I quite regularly marvel at what's happening. It's not that the things coming out of Silicon Valley are hugely innovative, but rather, as others have also pointed out, the growing ubiquity of all this stuff, and not just in the West. Perhaps a lot of the sentiment that often seems like hubris is really vindication and excitement: vindication because all the stuff we early-adopters loved and that others didn't understand (or even made fun of) is now used by everyone, and excitement because it means there's a market for the stuff we've been working with for so long. Perhaps the younger among us are mostly excited by what they see as new possibilities and what are, to them, new discoveries. For example, I remember making a game for Windows and I remember how excited I was that my parents and even some colleagues were playing it! I even put the game on floppies and printed my logo on it. Now, I'm teaching my younger brother programming by building the same game. The first difference this time around is that we're using javascript and HTML/CSS. In one day I set up the basic project with him that he can push to heroku and immediately show to friends and the world, and in about two weeks he worked through a number of CodeSchools lessons and has access to vastly more resources than I do. I feel happy and vindicated, in way, that my weird hobby is now practiced by someone who is not very nerdy, and my brother is getting excited about all the stuff he can imagine building and releasing into the wild. No need to buy floppies and hand out his game: it's instantly accessible to everyone with internet and a browser. Now this is just one example. Consider also the access to all kinds of roboty goodness that can be programmed with the same javascript, the fact that there's a huge potential paying audience through various app stores, and the huge (but probably rather unattainable) carrot of making the next Flappy Bird or whatnot.

wildermuthn 12y ago

> I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls over my GSM phone, chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc. As an early-adopter with sufficient income to afford whatever gadget you're talking about, I'm sure you found a lot of utility communicating with the <1% of our population that shared your position and enthusiasm. The other 99% of us had land-lines. Only some of us had the internet. > Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing I have no idea what you're talking about. Our society is now saturated with computers. We carry computers in our pockets that we casually call 'smart'. These devices are wirelessly connected in a global network that we casually call 'the internet'. Computing is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it anymore. > Sorry Sam, things are prettier now, but there's nothing new under the sun . . . everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form. Yes, the retina display existed in some form: in low-contrast PDA displays. Yes, 4G and 100mps broadband existed in some form: as in, dial-up screeching. Yes, Reddit existed in some form, as in your local BBS. Sometimes difference of degree are so great that they become differences of kind, precisely because they make further technological innovations possible. Any startup that hinges upon "network-effects" knows this. Anyone who's used an Oculus Rift has experienced it. There's nothing new under the sun? Only if you're living in the past.

untog 12y ago
There's nothing new under the sun? I don't think anyone is suggesting that nothing is new. Just that nothing is mind-blowingly new. As you say, the last ten years have seen a lot of improvements in existing concepts - connections are faster, displays are better, etc. etc. But that's not the kind of mind blowing change Sam suggests that it is. If you had told me ten years ago that tech would look like it does today I would say "yep, sounds about right".
- wildermuthn 12y ago
  I think the Oculus Rift is certainly mind-blowing. Also the fact that I can work remotely effectively. Thinking on this further, the difference between 10 years and 20 years is immense: 2004 vs 1994. Maybe we just need another 10 years to see how far we've really come since 2004. We are only just beginning to experience what happens when you connect the global population wirelessly.

retrogradeMT 12y ago

One major innovation that has occurred over the past decade has been the distribution of technology that was only available to a lucky few. Over the last decade tech has had a major impact on the daily lives of people like me. Today I can work from anywhere and communicate with everyone I know at any time of day, while 10 years ago I didn't have internet fast enough to watch a youtube video. iPhones weren't even sold in my state until 2008 (I might be off by a year in either direction).

austenallred 12y ago

Honestly, hackers/HN may be the wrong audience to ask this rhetorical question to (not that Sam was specifically asking it to us). The biggest difference of the last 10 years isn't so much the incredible new technology or protocols being built, it's how accessible those are to the everyday person, and how much easier they are to use. Look at the original HN submission for Dropbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863). The response from a lot of hackers was negative. Why? "We already have rsync." "We have FTP mounted locally with curlftpfs, with SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem + open source tools." That problem was already solved for hackers. But for the 99% of people who aren't hackers, seamlessly sharing files across computers (with backups and a sort of version control built in) was incredible. There are certainly technologies I love and adore that didn't exist 10 years ago (Twitter, everything being mobile, Uber/Lyft). But what I can do is largely unchanged. For someone who doesn't build things or understand github or use a terminal, however, the world has been revolutionized. Chris Dixon has pointed out that a lot of the great companies of today are Unix commands made accessible to the everyday person. (Grep->Google, rsync->Dropbox, man->stack overflow, cron->IFTTT). Some are a bit of a stretch (Google != Grep), but an interesting way to think about starting big companies is to think of something really cool or useful that only hackers can do right now. So, going back to Sam's question, "What was I doing 10 years ago?" It was pretty close to the same. I use almost all of the technologies he mentions, but could probably get by without them. For me, it's much more interesting to consider the question, "What was your mom doing 10 years ago?"

jacquesm 12y ago
Making something complex easy is an excellent way to start a business. Convenience is a huge driver and dropbox managed to keep it simple (at considerable cost in blood, sweat and tears no doubt). Hiding complexity is hard, doing it well is harder still.
misiti3780 12y ago
that chris dixon analogy is really interesting ... can you provide a link if you get a chance? EDIT: nevermind it was only a tweet :) https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/505118160811728896 https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/505118160811728896

untog 12y ago

I agree, to a point. But the thing that gets me is the passage where he says: I think it’s remarkable how much of what people do and use today didn’t exist 10 years ago. But all he lists above is apps. Yeah, sure, WhatsApp didn't exist ten years ago. But SMS did. Dropbox didn't, but PhotoBucket did. And so on, and so on. There's been a lot of change, but focusing on the kind of consumer apps that barely ever last a decade isn't a good way of highlighting it. Our interactions are still very similar to their ten year old equivalents, we just have different colour schemed apps to do them with.

nilkn 12y ago
> WhatsApp didn't exist ten years ago. But SMS did. SMS was barely accessible to most of the world and was often unaffordable when it was. It's easy to write off WhatsApp as just another app, but it was a vastly better solution for huge chunks of the planet than SMS ever was.
- untog 12y ago
  > SMS was barely accessible to most of the world and was often unaffordable when it was Sure. But everyone got SMS before they got data (and Whatsapp).
  - nilkn 12y ago
    Wi-Fi? Besides, what exactly is your point? People might have had access to SMS first, but it wasn't a good solution for much of the world. It seems to me that you're trying to argue that we haven't made much real progress in the past decade and that you're trivializing WhatsApp in order to support that point. It seems to me that you're focusing entirely too much on the longevity of specific apps and not looking at the changes that those apps actually represent. As for Dropbox, it's sort of like the iPod of cloud hosting services. Yes, hosting services like Photobucket existed. They were mostly bad and slow and hard-to-use and special-purpose and didn't offer much free storage.
    - untog 12y ago

logfromblammo 12y ago

If I agreed with this any more, I might sprain something. Fifteen years ago, I worked for a company that wrote software in Java, targeted at mobile phone users (one that would fail and be acquired within the following year). I did most of my shopping on-line. All of my friends could be contacted via instant messengers, phone, or e-mail. I could argue with strangers on bulletin boards. If I were more garrulous, I could have published a personal blog. There are very few things that have changed for me between then and now: 1. More of the bandwidth I consume is over wires, instead of via optical discs sent through the post or carried by hand. Netflix, Amazon, Steam, and GOG have largely replaced... Netflix and Amazon. Hmmm. 2. I am charged more for paid services. I also note that the quality of these services is often not substantially improved since then; they merely represent a larger share of my budget. 3. I am more concerned about my privacy. Companies are still as sloppy about protecting it as they ever were; they just collect and keep more information about us. 4. DRM schemes are more pervasive and annoying. Casual copyright infringement is easier than ever. 5. My video card can push out more hi-res triangles at 60 fps. 6. My oldest still-in-use computer is 6 years older, and is more likely to be replaced due to its relatively high power draw than its inability to run newer software. The last 15 years have been a predictable series of minor improvements on existing technologies, enabled largely by cheaper and more capable hardware, and pushed out to a progressively larger audience. This has been accompanied by aggressive attempts to squeeze more blood out of drier stones. 10 years ago, Sam's question would have appeared as a link on Slashdot, and parent post would be (+5, Insightful). There might even be meme images circulating of a caveman with caption "Facebook? // I do cave painting of my lunch 8000 year ago".

S4M 12y ago

I couldn't agree more with your comments: the innovations sama mentions are just shiny copies of what existed ten years ago, or maybe more - with a few exceptions. This article is pretty depressing, since what he is saying is in essence "we created lots of innovation in the last ten years, and now we are going to change the world even more, because we are investing in energy and biotech". Now the innovation, as you say, if pretty artificial, and the two companies that are worth the more in YC portfolio are one that is semi illegally disrupting hotels (there are reasons why it's forbidden to transform your flat into an hotel room) and another one that built a wrapper around rsync. I'm from Europe, and the view I have from the SV is more a bunch of hipster programmers with macbooks building social networks to share cat pictures, than a center of technical innovation, and sadly, this post is not making me change my mind. I do hope to be proven wrong.

dkarapetyan 12y ago
One reason it is a little depressing is because many of the technological innovations in the beginning were not driven by consumer needs but were results of actual research initiatives led by some pretty smart folks. I'm specifically thinking of PARC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_%28company%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_%28company%29) and there is obviously a bit of a creation myth kind of setup going on but the general gist remains valid.

cenhyperion 12y ago

You're confusing invention and innovation. Invention is the creation of a new product or category. Innovation is improving upon that and making it better and more accessible. Internet forums or instant messaging were inventions. Reddit and whatsapp were innovations. The technology may have been there 10 years ago, but it was nowhere near as robust, user friendly, scalable, well designed, or good. Thus, the majority of Americans didn't use the technology. Sam isn't arguing that those are new inventions, he's arguing that they're innovations that have spread the technology to the average consumer. > but with the exception of the Tesla, everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form Electric cars have existed since the late 1800s. Everything is innovation.

dzuc 12y ago

'The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed'... etc.

dismal2 12y ago
if the future is instagram and twitter, you can keep it
- yawaramin 12y ago
  You mean the ability to instantly and virally let people all over the world know about events happening in your country/region/neighborhood? Yeah thanks, we'll keep it.

yawaramin 12y ago

E-money and mobile internet on cell phones in developing countries. It's literally changed the lives of entire populations throughout the developing world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa