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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of Youtube. On-demand video was the "flying car" of Silicon Valley before them.

And what about Skype? The notion of a usable video-phone was pure fantasy for years prior to them.

And now, Tesla is doing this again.

I can walk into my grocery store, use their smart-phone app to get discounts on things I want to buy and then wave my phone at the self-checkout station to pay for it all. What a nice future.

Reminds me of these commercials: http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/ATT_You_Will . They seem so quaint now.

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I dont understand what point you are trying to make and how that may relate to what I said. Are you trying to state that new things are invented? If so, I think you missed my point which was that determining why things work now can also be a difficult question.

I wasn't being combative. Just adding to your examples.

There's countless things that people tried for decades and nobody succeeded in that are now ubiquitous.

It's easy to justify being dismissive of people trying things that have yet to succeed by this argument. But it's also, clearly not valid.

For instance, with the rise of cloud storage and web-applications, we are doing, essentially, thin client computing now - something that people said would never come.

Self-driving cars were another constant future-device (e.g., http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/Johnny_cab_clips_from_total_r...). And now it looks like we'll get them by the end of the decade. That's pretty impressive.

This is a meta request: could you post the direct YouTube link instead of, or in addition to, the link through your descriptive URL redirector? Despite the descriptive nature of the URL, I still trust a direct link to YouTube a lot more.

interesting. I just wrote that earlier that day. I was trying it for the first time in that comment. Failure already! That was fast.

Thin clients, a.k.a. "dumb terminals" with a prettier UI. (not more functional, quick or useful, but awesomely prettier)

From a software standpoint, there are now 2 categories:

1) Software as a service 2) Software as an end product

"1)" is more honest, because your customers only care about the service and you have nothing to gain by churning and regurgitating new-old-new-again ideas every 10 years in order to keep scoring new license deals.

"2)", well, I said it already: As a software vendor, you have no financial interest in selling anything that won't need to be replaced at least once a year. Hence, the constant renaming of recurring concepts over and over and over...in order to keep license revenues coming in.

It's interesting that you describe SaaS as more "honest"; it's like describing the loan shark in the back alley as more "honest" because he admits up front that he's charging an arm and a leg (perhaps literally) to borrow some money.

Though I use many SaaS offerings, I still prefer installable software as much as possible because once I own it, I own it forever. For example, Windows XP may reach EOL next year, but existing, activated copies aren't magically going to go away at that time.

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