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Comment by tostitos1979 | Hacker News Reader

tostitos1979

If you are a student of history, you start seeing these things. I was in tech in 1995, and at the start of the Internet boom it was not obvious to everyone what was happening. You should read Bill Gate's "The road ahead". He (and many others) predicted things like Netflix and the information super highway but they got the delivery mechanism dead wrong - people were convinced it was going to be over cable TV networks.

I've heard similar things about the boom/bust days of Commodore in the mid-80s.

I agree with the general thesis that (a) people are searching for the next big thing, and (b) we'll likely get it wrong a few times.

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In Kevin Kellys new book, The Inevitable [1], he talks about the trends and long-term forces that push and pull the actual implementations and delivery mechanisms of new technology.

I'd suggest that understanding the themes narrow down the search area for the Next Big Thing.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209431-the-inevitable

> He (and many others) predicted things like Netflix and the information super highway but they got the delivery mechanism dead wrong - people were convinced it was going to be over cable TV networks.

Oh yes, I remember how around 1994 people were predicting the rise of "interactive TV" that would take over the world in 1997. The descriptions of what "interactive TV" would do were very similar to the web.

The immediate predecessor of that was the multimedia CDROM. Its all the same idea and same skills of course. The course curricula for a BSCS with a specialization in multimedia in 1993 is identical to webdev in 2016 except for obvious language syntax differences. Graphic arts/design classes from the art school, marketing classes from the biz school, a couple programming classes, etc.

Ha .. almost forgot that one. Do you remember Encarta? Wikipedia of the old days :)

Um...for the most part it IS delivered over cable tv networks.

The challenge is when people start to try and predict the next cycle and what it will look like. Yes, you can get the broad brush-strokes right, but details are usually very wrong and timing is way off.

Glad that painting is here to stay.

Have you any good resources for recommendation?

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