

Technology principle: The toy will win - cool-RR
http://blog.garlicsim.org/post/1495459004/technology-principle-the-toy-will-win

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wzdd
It's just too easy to make a case by taking a retrospective look at the
winners. I want to see a current battleground along with a prediction of which
one is the toy and which one is the non-toy.

Here's an example of why it's hard: iPhone vs Android. Well, obviously the
iPhone is the toy. You have to do incredibly awkward things, or pay Apple
$100, to run your own code on it; you can't tether it (sometimes); you can't
replace the Web browser. It's hard to script it. Want to use your favourite
email client? Good luck.

But hang on. Clearly Android is the toy. You can pick up Android phones for a
lot less than an iPhone. Most of these phones are nowhere near as pretty or as
specced out as an iPhone -- but pick one up and you've got the complete
Android experience. If you want to hack on it, go ahead. If what you're
looking for isn't built in to the phone, chances are someone's written it for
you. Sure, it's messy, but that's democracy.

But hold up again. Smartphones are getting cheaper, but who really needs such
a powerful, battery-sucking device in their pocket? Maybe the real "toy" of
this generation is yet to emerge.

In five years someone will write an article about how obvious it was that
iPhones would succeed because they were the simple accessible choice, or that
Android would succeed because it was democratising, or that something else
entirely would succeed because the smartphone genre was a fad.

Disclaimer: I agree with the general sentiment of the article.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Your comment makes me realize a problem with this article: It's not that it
isn't true, it is _too_ true. Its title is a tautology. Of course the
technological winner will always be a toy. To a proper hacker, _every_ object
is a potential toy.

The very expensive multiphoton microscopes that I once worked with were, and
still are, very serious medical research tools. But they were also wonderful
toys. Building them was fun. For an R&D engineer, _engineering is fun_.

Which were the "serious" computers again? The ones that were never used for
fun? But that excludes _all_ of them. Sometimes the fun was right out in the
open: The DEC PDP-1 of 1959, for example, became famous as a game machine,
because Spacewar was written on it. But I'll bet that even old-school bank-
account data processing was a lot of fun when it was first being invented. I
bet even COBOL programmers had fun, especially in 1960 when COBOL was brand
new.

------
gaius
I think it's more subtle than that. For the micro to supplant the mini
(mainframes are alive and well, thankyouverymuch) it had to _become_ one. A
contemporary PC running Linux or NT is not only _faster_ than a VAX, it is
actually more complicated under the hood. This should be easy to prove: do
whatever you need to do to get a complete process listing of your preferred
system. How much do you, probably an "expert" if you're even reading HN, know
about each and every process? Try the same thing on a CP/M box if you have
one...

The real lesson is, it's easier to make a simple thing more complex than it is
to make a complex thing more simple.

~~~
maguay
"it's easier to make a simple thing more complex than it is to make a complex
thing more simple"

And unfortunately, that's why today's toys will be tomorrow's dinosaurs. That
said, this is exactly why mobile is winning now. It's so much simpler. There's
no reason it's so complicated to do something on a PC, other than that the
simple thing from then has now become more complex

~~~
wazoox
> this is exactly why mobile is winning now. It's so much simpler.

Are you sure? Here's a relevant quote :

 _I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone;
my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my
telephone._

Bjarne Stroustrup

~~~
maguay
I'm not sure for everything, but on iOS 4.1 with my iPod Touch (so no, I don't
have a modern mobile phone, but this is basically the same) it's much easier
to do the things most people do (Twitter, Facebook, email) than it is on a PC.
Plus, want to install a game? A couple taps and a couple dollars, and you're
ready to play a game within seconds.

Compare that with a PC: find a game online, create an account to download it,
spend $20-$50 on it or perhaps just $10-$15 if it's a basic game, wait while
it downloads, then step through the installer and if all goes well, you can
play your game.

We're all programed to do it, and it's a no brainer for those of us that are
used to it, but the iOS model is so much simpler for people who don't enjoy
tweaking a machine and just want it to work.

~~~
LordLandon
_Compare that with a PC: find a game online, create an account to download it,
spend $20-$50 on it or perhaps just $10-$15 if it's a basic game, wait while
it downloads, then step through the installer and if all goes well, you can
play your game._

    
    
      sudo apt-get install tremulous && tremulous

------
jncraton
I'm going to nitpick a little bit about the Arduino. Just to be clear, I won
an Arduino and love it, but the article misrepresents it a little bit.

It states that the Arduino is a microcontroller. This is false. From the
Arduino website:

> Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on
> flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.

The Arduino is an entire prototyping platform. It includes software which
makes it easy to use, and it includes a lot of extra peripherals that make it
more expensive. In the professional realm, Arduinos are not that popular.
They're just too expensive. The microcontroller that the Arduino uses costs a
few dollars, which is a tiny fraction of $30 for the whole board. Any
professional will be comfortable enough to just program a basic
microcontroller and build the small amount of circuitry to power it.

~~~
cool-RR
Thanks for the corrections, I edited the article a bit. (I'm still comfortable
calling the Arduino a "microcontroller with some software included" since this
is what Wikipedia is calling it.)

~~~
edderly
Whilst fixing that I might also point out that the processor on Beagleboard
isn't a microcontroller either. The memory is external, it typically runs
HLOSs etc. etc.

------
yewweitan
Nice article. Adds another dimension to the Innovator's Dilemma

[http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/04/understanding-...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/04/understanding-
how-the-innovators-dilemma-affects-you/)

~~~
JeffJenkins
Is that article a sufficient summary of the innovator's dilemma, or is it
still worth reading the book?

~~~
mahmud
The book's good reputation makes it unlikely that there is only 4-pages of
meat for this to be an accurate summary.

~~~
gruseom
The book is worth reading, but half of it is historical data about disk
drives.

Edit: I think it's a bit overrated, actually. Had it been a quarter of its
size and stripped of its pretentiousness, it actually might be the classic
everyone says it is. That being said, its core insight is an important and
good one, so you kind of have to read it anyway.

------
benohear
Is it me, or is the author confusing incumbent and enterprise? Office is not
'enterprise' in my book, nor is Yahoo. MS Exchange, maybe. SAP and Salesforce
definitely. I'm not sure I see any toys entering that space. Mint is what I
can think of that comes closest.

I'm also not convinced by the whole scripting language thing. There is
certainly a healthy debate to be had between static and dynamic languages but
I'm not sure that too many people poo-poo'd Python or Ruby (unlike PHP). Also
to suggest that those have "won" vis-a-vis Java or .Net is jumping the gun
somewhat IMO.

Other than that, the central argument is essentially disruption theory, but as
gaius points out the idea there is that you start off as a "toy" with a
particular advantage which, despite the limitations, allows you to carve out a
niche. Then you take over the entire market by growing capacity without losing
the initial advantage and pushing the incumbent into an increasingly small
niche at the high end. However, by that time the product is fully featured,
becomes the incumbent and ceases to be a "toy".

------
Hexstream
"But as the years passed and hardware became faster the relative slowness of
dynamic languages became less relevant, while their advantages in programmer
productivity became much more relevant."

Let's not discount the fundamental advances to compilation and performance of
"dynamic" languages of relatively recent years. Just look at Javascript.

Dynamic languages look much less amenable to optimization at first than static
languages, but many new techniques have been discovered, and sometimes there
are even optimizations that are only possible to do at runtime if the
environment supports it.

~~~
runT1ME
In the meantime, the 'advantage' of dynamic languages such as verbosity and
the functional additions they had before the OO languages are becoming lesser,
with newer languages having both static typing and type inference, functional
features, etc.

~~~
hakl
I'm reminded of this post: <http://lambda-the-
ultimate.org/node/1562#comment-18623>

------
lwhi
I think the initial definition is incorrect.

A definition of 'toy' needs to include motivation. Most of the time, people
will use a toy for its entertainment value rather than its ability to help
them carry out productive work. This is the reason that toys aren't always
considered as 'serious'.

The essay seems to be suggesting that a small, less complicated product, has a
lot of benefits over larger, more complicated products.

I don't think this is surprising.

------
hokumpokum
Toys are indeed great, but don't try and 'win' with them. The rational
approach with toys is to _play_ with them.

~~~
erikig
Reminds me of CDixon's article a couple of months ago:
[http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-
start-o...](http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-
looking-like-a-toy/)

------
VladRussian
it isn't that toy will win. It is that the things evolve into the "toys", ie.
much better UX.

