
Not dead, just resting: How discredited technologies can be unexpectedly resurrected - robg
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12381449
======
mechanical_fish
The lesson I draw from this is that you should be sensitive to the distinction
between "discredited" and "making progress on a longer time scale than you can
recognize".

You can discredit _any_ technology -- or overestimate it, for that matter --
by analyzing it on a short enough time scale, just as you can take a random
walk and interpret it as a series of dramatic surges and crashes.

~~~
silentbicycle
Look at Smalltalk, for example: Sometimes things don't need to be directly
successful to have a _huge_ influence.

------
helveticaman
I hope Dvorak starts picking up traction.

~~~
nostrademons
Anecdotally, it seems to have gotten a big boost when Microsoft (and Linux!)
started including the Dvorak layout in system software and providing an easy
way to switch between layouts on a per-program basis.

The first time I tried out Dvorak, I had to hack around in ResEdit, make a new
keyboard layout, and then glue labels to a keyboard cover. If I weren't 12
years old, I would never have had time to bother. And even then, I gave up
after a few days because I had homework due that I needed to type up fast, and
couldn't afford to put up with hunt-and-peck.

When I tried again in college, everything was all preinstalled, and I just had
to change a Keyboard setting. And I could alt-shift to go back to Qwerty, so
if something urgent came in - say, I had to respond to an instant message - I
could do that and then go back to learning.

------
coglethorpe
I remember a comment a long time ago that paper would never die because it is
too "user friendly." That was back in the late 1980's when that phrase was
thrown around a lot, but it looks like it is true.

------
mixmax
I wrote about something very similar a while back:
<http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/04/why-bubble-burst.html>

------
nailer
Best recent example is Social networking. Friendster was a joke before
MySpace, er, made it popular before making it a joke again.

Later Facebook may have succeeded in not making it a joke.

~~~
nostrademons
Online video-sharing as well. This was a joke in the first dot-com boom:
everybody _tried_ including RealAudio on their pages, but too many people were
on dialup, the player was unreliable, and quality was too grainy. Then YouTube
came along in 2005, after everyone had gone to broadband, and suddenly
succeeded.

------
davidw
Dupe:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328767>

I think it's an interesting idea though. How many things sort of fade, or
don't take off, only to be resurrected and achieve popularity elsewhere?

~~~
robg
I'm stumped these days on how to handle dupes. I had been deleting them when
folks pointed them out (except the print version over the multipage one). But
here it's apparent that a bunch of folks didn't see the original. I wish I
could transfer the karma points to you, or link this submission to the
original, though I imagine that would introduce many more new complications.

What do other folks think about duplicates?

~~~
davidw
> What do other folks think about duplicates?

I don't really care - unless pg creates some kind of market for the karma
points I have accumulated, they're worthless (like ideas?:-)

~~~
robg
Why do folks (hint, hint) point them out though? I can't say my memory is good
enough to recognize dupes. I know on a few occasions I've submitted something
_I_ had previously submitted.

~~~
davidw
Shrug... part ego gratification, part "hey, this system might be better at
catching these things".

