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Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

  Parker suggests that one reason it will end badly is 
  because the Internet industry will ultimately consolidate
  just like the PC industry did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Why? Why does the future have to be like the past? As rich and well connected Sean Parker is, he cannot predict the future. Coincidently given his stature it makes him probably the least qualified to predict what will ultimately happen in the computing industry.

There is no reason the computing industry cannot be more flat than it has in the past. I believe it is highly likely the industry will continue to fragment. Android, IOS, Windows7, BBX... there will be more platforms in the future, not less. More diversification, not less. The game has changed forever, as it should.

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People tend to forget the big got big in those days partly because of control over distribution channels. It was incredibly difficult for a small software company to break into large amounts of sales if they didn't have both retail and enterprise reach.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a smaller set of niche hardware companies pop up going against that trend, and I certainly see the state of software at the moment fragmenting further, not consolidating more. While Facebook and Google theoretically are dominating the distribution channels again, in reality those channels can be leveraged by smaller players easily. As if every boxed windows copy in 1995 had an empty slot where you could put your own company at low cost.

Absolutely. The web and now HTML5 completely obliterate the old school mentality that you need to have conventional sales channels, and ancient business models to suceed. Any of these "big wigs" that think Apple and Google will dominate forever will be proven wrong.

The issue with fragmentation that ultimately leads to consolidation is the cost incurred by companies and developers to support all of these platforms.

I can't tell you how much it pains me as an android user to see an app only available for the iPhone. As a developer, it's magnitudes worse to have to send messages to my users saying "we'll be getting to an [x] platform app soon!" when realistically it just stunts our growth to develop the same thing 3 times.

I can't wait for the end of this native app nonsense.

Don't forget that the end of fragmentation can be the end of innovation. It's 2011 and browser standards don't support taking a photo. There's tons of other things that standards don't support and there will be more. And if or when browsers are the only platform, fragmentation will come there. It's already happening, Chrome supports native code, IE will not support the same format.

> I can't wait for the end of this native app nonsense.

As an iOS developer I recommend that you try to understand how much more intellectually satisfying developing for the iphone is than android or HTML5!

I was coming strictly from the standpoint of time being the scarcest factor and thus the most important; I completely agree with you on the intellectual satisfaction of developing native apps :)

"Why does the future have to be like the past?"

That's what everyone says in a bubble: "History won't repeat itself this time!" Unfortunately, while industries and companies change and evolve, human nature (specifically fear, greed, and hype) doesn't change. The wise learn from history while the rest keep repeating the mistakes from 15-20 years before.

Did the Internet repeat the same cycle as the Industrial Age? Did cell phone uptake follow the same patterns as rotary phones?

The idea that history repeats itself is, itself, dated. Technology changes things in ways people cannot really predict. The only thing you can reliably predict is what is expensive to do today will be cheap tomorrow. What these many small startups will collectively build on top of cheap "cloud services" and "mobile devices" will change the world.

It is pedantic to assume that history will repeat itself no matter what in every possible industry!...Things are not always just as simple to be explained in terms of periodic cycles.

And it's not pedantic to assume that history won't repeat itself simply because you're blinded by euphoria and hype? I'm not saying that history always repeats itself, but the human nature that causes boom and bust cycles doesn't change.

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