| liquidninja said: @WereKitten ... We determined the success of the Internet. If we didn't need it; if it wasn't convenient for us, it would not be in every home. Just because they developed the Internet didn't mean we would automatically buy it in the name of science. They had to make it useful for us first. |
And yet my point was that there was no explicit, conscious general need for the internet before it was offered.
Engineers and scientists might be over-confident in what the appeal of new technologies might be for the general public, and yet if it wasn't for their probing -resulting in both great successes as great failures- those great jumps would not happen.
Revolutionary innovations can come from mass adoption of cheaper/simpler products -as in the disruption theory- or come top-down from technological innovations that make the product available or viable at all.
As such, relying on mass consumer guidance only is as much tunnel vision as relying on the appeal a new tech has for the technically-inclined minority. Malstrom seems to be so fixated with the disruption theory, that it's all he seems to see everywhere. And he fixates on short-term marketing and economy so much that he seems to measure everything on the scale of the sales of products. Whereas a tech that fails to gain mass adoption might still have had a great value in breaking new grounds development-wise, in testing the usage pattern of a small minority of users and so on.
Altavista used to be the biggest web search engine years ago. And yet it was not a financial success, so much that big players such as MS did not think it could be a viable business and never invested heavily in it. Then came Google and it became both one of the most known brands on earth and a huge cash mine.
It was not bottom-up disruption. It was a massive improvement over the known past experiences and quite a bit of academic research (heavy usage of an infrastructure based over map-reduce algorythms), and yet it led to an explosive success over the incumbent competitors.
BTW, on a very different issue.
Can you quote a developer or publisher saying that the future of games is in having user-generated content only? You say it is not a strawman, thus please present me the man in flesh and blood.
