Ask HN: Is the tech industry out of ideas?
Potentially inflammatory question, but I'm asking with sincere curiosity. It feels to me that the transformative era of tech is over, and we are now in "maintenance mode," for lack of a better term. The '80s and '90s revolutionized computing, and the web matured into a real platform during the '00s and '10s. The big players grew from one- or two-person projects in literal or proverbial garages into firmly established global juggernauts. (In some cases this began in the '70s.) Whole industries—publishing, entertainment, transportation, retail, communication—were fundamentally changed, and whole new ways of connecting people were developed. New ideas and technologies were sprouting up everywhere, and they were exciting and solved obvious problems. It wasn't all roses of course, and there's much discussion to be had on the externalities, but it was undeniably revolutionary.
Now it seems, to me at least, that the party is more or less over. I'm wondering if anyone else feels this way or if I've simply become jaded and cynical. (I am prone to jadedness and cynicism so this is entirely possible.) Things like "the metaverse" and the bizarrely-named "web3" feel like desperate attempts to keep finding the next big thing in a field that has simply run out of big things to find. I can't identify a single small company working on something that feels like it'll be huge—the next Google, Netflix, or what have you. The spirit of the early days seems impossible to find now.
This is just my personal experience. I would love to hear both from people who feel this way and from people who disagree.
12 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadFor instance, people got excited about Facebook and there was a short time that funding was copious for social media startups. One Facebook figured out revenue, it got so big that nobody believed a new social media company could succeed, other than possibly getting bought out by Facebook. (Then Tik Tok came along, enabled by Facebook being banned in China.)
Back in the 1990s people thought Microsoft was so dominant that venture capitalists wouldn't fund anything that competes with Microsoft.
Tech companies are now competing for investment with bubblenomic plays such as "Web3" and
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/adam-neumann-s-new-startup-flow-...
Part of the problem is that if you see something small you think will be big, depending on your position someone will either buy it or copy it.
For a company to go from 0 to massive, a lot of people with resources need to pass on the idea.
Look at what patents are expiring, what fields are being juiced by macro moves in the industry (e.g. LIDAR with autonomous driving), and look for problems that are becoming or already are expensive and currently have no or just cumbersome solutions in the market at the moment.
Any tips for how to find these?
No. No. No. No.
There's is much better ahead and it's not blockchain, or web3. It's not centralized mega corporations that abuse or leech off the fruits of civilization.
It's a unified theory of data management. It's a decentralized future of autonomous, interoperable communities with their own infrastructure who have power over what they choose to be and what happens to what they are and have.
The increased centralization and specialization has made it worthwhile for members of the communities to behave unethically. The potential fruits of a successful scam as a business as a politician as a clergyman have outweighed any potential downfall for at least 20 years. Government has failed to adapt to the massive population increases and has been exploited individually by DoS'ed institutions and that has inspired others in doing the same effectively creating a DDoS.
We can do much better, we must do much better.
So basically “Web3”
types in all lowercase and constantly talks about web3 and crypto
As a forty-something I just can't grok web3. It seems futile and unnecessary when you consider all that we have already. 'How much is enough?'
I imagine a lot of people my age are just coasting, making full use of already existing tech and don't seek 'the new shiny' since we've already done that in our youth and that game gets boring. We've done it. We've arrived. Tech still has its issues, but we don't complain.
The whole thing is an embarrassing joke, and every good promised thing, from wind farms in Ghana to banking the unbanked hasn't happened as promised.
Examples: Rare earth magnets are expensive, it turns out that there's a hard to synthesize but quite stable and useful form of Iron Nitride alpha Fe16N2 which at working temperature, is more powerful than rare earth magnets, and is being developed in the US.
There are folks here on HN who are poking around with ideas for tools that directly manipulate the tree structures that compilers build, to make far, far more powerful programming tools.
There are operating systems that don't trust things by default, they could get rid of the idea of virus scanning everything by making it obsolete.
To quote the old song "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades."
I prefer a bigger screen with a real keyboard and os, but many people don't and industries like mp3 players, point-and-shoot camera makers and even those who sold ring tones are essentially gone. Alarm clock makers must have seen their sales decline rapidly. On the other hand, entire new industries have started to make apps.
I have tried an occulus for minecraft and even though that was more than ten years ago I knew that that experience was different. I had jumped around in minecraft a lot, but this was the first time I got the same feeling in my stomach I would have had if I had been standing on the edge of that cliff. Even though it was all minecraft graphics and totally not real, it felt more real in away that no non-vr game can feel.
I don't know if the metaverse is the next big thing, and I hope that facebook doesn't own it, but dismissing things like toys are _exactly_ what happened to all the other things we take for granted.
Microcomputers were once dismissed as toys. They couldn't be used for real work, or run a real os.
Look at where we are now.