Had to find out what eventually happened with Quittner/McDonalds.com:
"Quittner did indeed offer the name back to McDonald's in one of his magazine columns, but not in exchange for money. In a manner reminiscent of the Princeton Review, he instead offered to surrender the domain name if McDonald's corporation would underwrite some Internet equipment for a grade school. This and other provoking articles caught the corporation's attention; they responded not by funding grade school computer access, but by pressuring the InterNIC to revoke Quittner's registration of the name. Although the registry had stayed out of previous disputes such as the Adam Curry litigation, sticking tenaciously to its "first-come, first-served" policy, it wavered before this new corporate threat. InterNIC first resisted McDonalds' demands, then eventually agreed to revoke the registration, then changed its mind again, leaving the registration with Quittner. McDonald's ultimately agreed to donate $3,500 to purchase the equipment."
Yes? That's basically what large corporations do today...
Nissan (the car company) is still working to get nissan.com, and they're almost exclusively attempting to do it through legal means instead of negotiating with the current owner.
How we access the internet has changed (mobile, smartphones, pervasive broadband), and businesses effectively provide great services connected to the Internet (Amazon in particular), but for me, the only real changes other than those from ~1992 to today are mixed:
1) Lots more people on the Internet
2) Lower barrier to access
Sure, it's prettier, but USENET, IRC, etc. basically covered what we do with the Internet today. USENET was still technically superior to most discussion tools today; the web was a big step backward overall until the mid/late 200Xs, vs. native clients.
Couldn't disagree with you more. To name just a dozen new internet things from the last 10 years that I did not have in 1990s.
o Google
o Wikipedia
o Netflix
o iTunes
o Spotify/Pandora
o Stack Exchange/Overflow
o RSS (Google Reader/Feedly/etc..)
o GitHub
o Facebook
o Instagram
o Whatsapp
o Gmail
o Google Earth/Maps.
I can only imagine what the next dozen new categories will be invented in the next 15 years.
> I can only imagine what the next dozen new categories will be invented in the next 15 years.
I don't think 15 years will make that much difference, the economics have changed and have been turned on the head. Today we have this handful of mega corporations with billions of cash in their coffers that are responsible for much of the services used by most of the world everyday and they also reap most of the revenue. Every new entrant even remotely successful it's either squashed or bought out, so I don't think there's there's the potential for a new company to reach the same heights. In fact, I think the market will be exactly the same, if there will be a bunch of new big companies out there, they will likely be started by the same entrepreneurs responsible for today's major ventures, they are the ones with the loads of cash, remember.
Handling video and audio was an improvement brought mostly by computing technology vs. the Internet expanding; I'm fine with a LAN-local archive of music and video (admittedly, using flac/mp3 and bd remux and h264), and a lot of my content was ripped from physical media vs. downloaded. So the streaming services aren't terribly compelling to me.
(Pictures, too -- until the late 1990s, graphics were a pain)
USENET > RSS.
CVS for projects like FreeBSD wasn't particularly worse than GitHub.
gmail is actually inferior to mutt + own mail server in a lot of ways; it's easier to set up.
Google Earth/Maps are awesome, as is google search. Wikipedia is the kind of thing which easily could have existed in the 1990s-style Internet; FAQs were largely the same thing, just structured differently. I'd count it, but I do think a 1990-era Internet would have eventually created some kind of repository of indexed knowledge like Wikipedia.
re: streaming, the value is the instant access to the content. how did you fill up your hard drive? rip DVDs? Pirate it? Totally absurd to say streaming legal content instantly is not compelling vs. the file server/warez approach.
Web based e-mail is obviously superior to setting up your own mail server. Zero-install, access anywhere. I have memories of configuring sendmail and ripping my hair out. You really think this was a superior way of dealing with something as fundamental as e-mail? Nowadays it "just works." In the interim we had ISP hosted mail servers which were always broken, misconfigured, going down, and eating our e-mail. I remember walking on eggshells helping people set up their ISP e-mail knowing that I was one checkbox away ("Leave a copy of e-mail on server") from making it so their entire e-mail history was a hard drive crash from being destroyed permanently.
And don't get me started on OSS source control. Github has transformed the way open source works. CVS (and non DVCSes in general) sucked. The online tools sucked. I still cringe when I get redirected to source forge for a download. A lot of amazing work got done but I'd never want to go back there.
I'm with you that wikipedia "the software" could have been created in the 1990s, but it would have been a barren wasteland without the larger access the web has now. In fact, I'd be shocked if there weren't a handful of attempts to bild an open internet based encyclopedia during that time, and now we have selection bias making us think wikipedia was the first. So what you see there is an example of something that, imho, couldn't exist without wider access to the web. Ie, it's an example of not just better tooling but Internet applications that became enabled by wider access, which is what you seem to have been arguing against actually existing.
Not sure what newsgroups you use these days, but every one I ever made use of has turned into a cesspool of spam and low value content. Usenet has been dead for at least 5+ years for me - there was a 4 year period where my fingers had memorized every shortcut available to nn...
>You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”
It's a bit easy to imagine once something's already survived it. A device with a hundred sensors probably survived hundreds or thousands of failed released or unreleased iterations. Every other mature field has probably gone through this same sentiment (and maybe still going through it, and perhaps will always go through it). If only astronomers today could imagine what new, novel techniques are just lying right in front of them with all of this computing power and automated manufacturing ability. Imagine how much further ahead astronomers would be in 2044 if they had discovered thingamajig back in 2014 instead of 2040! I think the greybeards of 2044 would be a bit biased.
But this feels like we'd be backpedaling on choosing the right tool for the right job. Slapping AI onto something and watching it fail is great for our knowledge, but not our wallets. This is when business leaders create friction with development. This is where you get "Just make it work" commands which gets the snowball of technical debt rolling. The value gained is "This solution sucked in reality! Or maybe we just sucked delivering it! Don't do what we did unless you have a good reason!", but that's not what we're really after, is it? We could sit around and brute force a bunch of combinations of ideas and markets, I guess.
And finally, if it was true back in 1985 with domain names, and it's true today with AI and the cloud, why wouldn't it be true for 2044 with VR contact lenses and holodecks? It seems like the future will be like then and now in this regard. So.. there will always be a wide open frontier somewhere? Do we really say anything substantial by saying "Today's an open frontier for internet ideas!"
I think there's a lot less low-hanging fruit than this article might have us believe.
There most definitely is low hanging fruit. If you had the benefit of perfect hindsight from 20 or 30 years in the future, almost certainly there are things you could create today and be wildly successful with.
However, none of us have the benefit of perfect hindsight from the future. We have to actually figure out what to do for ourselves, the hard way. And once your development skills get to a certain point, figuring out what to do is much harder than figuring out how to do it, generally.
And so that makes that low hanging fruit not all that easy to get to after all, which is your point I guess! But still, the article gives a useful angle to think of these things from, I think.
I think his point is that, as the technological sphere expands, there is continually more opportunity than there ever has been before. In that light, your best point seems to be that most of us looking to capitalize on that opportunity will fail, as have most innovators before.
The funny thing about the Wired article they mention [0] is that it first ridicules McDonalds for being so tech-unsavy, and in the very next sentece suggests Burger King register a domain name containing an underscore...
I think phreeza's point was that underscores aren't allowed in host names. (Officially, at least. I feel like I've seen them work and then sometimes seen them not work.)
I tell this to people all the time. Usually my analogy is that working on the web now is like working on Television in the 60s. It's still early and while the medium might be defined, the delivery and the product never is.
Good article. Reminds me of the proverb that says that although the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, th second best time is today. If only I could remember to keep that point-of-view more often...
There is no such thing as "the low-hanging fruit".
The year is 1982. Rodney Mullen just managed to perform the world's first "Ollie" skateboarding trick, that can be count as somewhat the start of the modern day street skateboarding.
What now is the most junior skateboarding trick (with available equipment, training etc.) was not a low-hanging fruit back then. While looking back, you can easily learn the trick by imitating; but back then there was no-one to learn it from. You had to go trial-and-error a sh*tload of times before making the first trick.
Of course it looks sooo low-hanging fruit now. With current equipment and support. But you have to realise that the tools and methods came afterwards, to support the original invention. But looking the time back then, you had none of the aids. Just you, climbing to that tall tree to grab the apple and plant the seeds so everyone else could grab the fruits from smaller trees.
"... saturated, bloated, overstuffed with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content ..."
The article has a nice positive message, but it needs to be tempered with experience that railroads didn't go on being formed and expand forever in the 1890s, nor did car companies around 1910. Starting Tesla might be a good idea, but don't forget Delorean and Yugo, and 80s home computers, and early 80s video games.
I'm not claiming the opposite negative view is correct (unlike the article's claim about that the positive view is correct). The negative view is worth considering. Also among readers who know about the above argument, some acknowledgement that the opposition exists might make the article more persuasive.
You make a good point, but I think it's clear that the Internet and HTTP will be here to stay for a long time. It's just a matter of creating something that adds real value.
Correct. Note: US centric dates: My point being that starting up a railroad in 1850 was a great idea, not so good by 1900.
Or there were about 150 startup automobile mfgrs around 1900, not quite so many by 1925.
Starting up a telephone company in 1900, good idea, in 1950, not so good idea.
We still have railroads and car mfgrs and telcos in 2014, they're just not realistic startup fields.
Every other field of recent human activity has gone thru the same stages of startup success, startup failures/consolidations, oligopoly oscillating with semi-regulated public utility, sometimes a long term decline in the industry after that.
Someday its economically inevitable that "Internet and HTTP" will not be the place to do startups. I don't think its today, but my grand kids are highly unlikely to be doing internet startups.
I remember having McDonalds.com in a shopping cart, ready to buy it. It was 1993 and I wasn't sure if it was worth $35 per year - I expected I would get sued.
I chickened out, and didn't buy any dot com domain names, and went back to my business at the time that had nothing to do with tech. I also chickened out from buying any other domain name until 1999.
So one of my life regrets is that I didn't buy a whole lot of domain names in 1993 when I first looked at them. A few millions in income missed.....
You were afraid to do it. The sale of the domain later for a large amount of money resolved that fear inside you, only leaving the desire to have bought it. This is regret defined. While it serves a purpose in our lives in teaching a lesson, it makes very little logical sense to wish for a future scenario where you are less afraid, or more intent without considering the reasons why you were to begin with.
To avoid regret, realize and accept you are going to make mistakes. To avoid regret, face your fears when they are presented to you. The choice to do what scares you the most is the single most important ability you have in controlling your fate in this universe.
> Couldn't they claim it was copyright infringement?
No, though they could claim trademark infringement (which is an important difference).
Trademarks can (but do not need to be) registered in order to be protected, and an unregistered trademark can trump a registered trademark if it precedes the registered one, if it is in a sufficiently different "category", if it is geographically distinct, or for a number of other reasons. One interesting example is the Burger King in Mattoon, Illinois[0].
The USPTO is very clear to note that registering a trademark is not a guarantee of validity of the trademark, and they do not issue refunds on the application if the trademark is successfully challenged and invalidated later.
In this particular case he'd be less likely to win against McDonald's, especially if all he's doing is domain squatting.... but you never know - take a look at http://www.chaseonline.com .
You can be too late, with respect to certain windows.
For a while, people made significant money selling highly desired domain names, including to big companies.
Now, those companies just "take them away" via trademark infringement claims. The legal structure for doing so has since been constructed and tested by them.
One of my concerns is that more and more such windows are being closed. It's not the isolated case, but the overall trend towards a corporate and corporate state restricted "push" implementation.
I don't really see how disallowing people from registering a name already in use by a person or company goes against "openness". If you're using someone else's name, I think they're justified in trying to forcibly retake control of it.
The argument made here is flawed. There is still plenty of "low hanging fruit" today but the cost/barrier of entry is significantly higher than it was in the early days.
"People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the internet"
Seems to me like even if developing a holodeck is looked at as an iterative process comprised of many small innovations it's still a lot more daunting and less feasible for a small team to do than building an online book store in the 90s.
With that said the internet is obviously in its infancy and the opportunities now are indeed boundless.
When the author is wearing gloves with cut off fingers* and poking around in the rubble of the post apocalyptic civilization looking for an iron bar suitable for fending off packs of wild dogs, I hope he remembers writing this article.
Ok... that was a bit dark. But my point is... no one knows exactly what the future holds. I do expect he is somewhat correct and more advances are in store. But sometimes given the geopolitical and resource situation I become less confident of this as a certainty.
*Post apocalypse characters must wear gloves with cut off fingers. See Mad Max and The Matrix for specific style references if you wish to make your own in preparation.
I, too, have fear of the future. Specifically in terms of the unstable world we live in. In some regards we're very lucky in that certain things are much more difficult for the world to let happen, mostly due to the speed at which news (and outrage) travels.
But, at the same time, I'm forced to admit that if it comes down to it, we really are very much powerless. This is specifically why I'm an anarcho-capitalist, as I believe that the state is the single most dangerous entity we can conceive of; and we've gone ahead and given it near-absolute control over our lives with what lately seems to be very little oversight.
As an aside, the article is indeed quite motivating. No time like the present, I say.
But honestly, I think we make an important and incorrect assumption- we try to revolutionise by evolution.
Why put smartphones on your wrist or your head and call it a revolution? Why make an app that is a Tinder or a Wikipedia or a Google for something else and call it a revolution?
The real revolutions are going to be things that havent been thought of yet, in any manner. In the meanwhile, we have this hyper-accelerated evolution- lets focus on lowering the barriers for entry...
> Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier!
Maybe the rest of the article is making it sound simpler than it is. But I couldn't agree with the above lines more.
I take issue with the comparison. The barriers to the internet were many times lower than the current round of innovations (3d printing, virtual reality). The only thing that comes close is bitcoin and the relative cheapness lasted only a few years.
The barriers were still high back then, but they were different barriers. Bandwidth, CPU and storage all cost a lot more than they do now, and the tools available were less sophisticated. Building an online store or CMS back then was a much bigger piece of work.
Today, you don't need to focus on those kinds of problems, generally. The problems are the next level up.
Great motivational read for budding or aspiring entrepreneurs. The one point I'd add to the article is to start viewing the world as a solver because we have more tools to fix and build better solutions than we did 30 years ago.
"Quittner did indeed offer the name back to McDonald's in one of his magazine columns, but not in exchange for money. In a manner reminiscent of the Princeton Review, he instead offered to surrender the domain name if McDonald's corporation would underwrite some Internet equipment for a grade school. This and other provoking articles caught the corporation's attention; they responded not by funding grade school computer access, but by pressuring the InterNIC to revoke Quittner's registration of the name. Although the registry had stayed out of previous disputes such as the Adam Curry litigation, sticking tenaciously to its "first-come, first-served" policy, it wavered before this new corporate threat. InterNIC first resisted McDonalds' demands, then eventually agreed to revoke the registration, then changed its mind again, leaving the registration with Quittner. McDonald's ultimately agreed to donate $3,500 to purchase the equipment."
From http://jolt.richmond.edu/v1i1/burk.html