
Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible  - jasonlbaptiste
http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/build-what-had-previously-not-been-possible/
======
RiderOfGiraffes
From "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming (discussed at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067>) :

    
    
        Most great scientists know many important problems.
        They have something between 10 and 20 important
        problems for which they are looking for an attack.
        And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them
        say "Well that bears on this problem." They drop all
        the other things and get after it.
    
        ...
    
        The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up,
        get after it and they pursue it. They drop all other
        things. They get rid of other things and they get
        after an idea because they had already thought the
        thing through. Their minds are prepared; they see
        the opportunity and they go after it. Now of course
        lots of times it doesn't work out, but you don't have
        to hit many of them to do some great science. It's
        kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is to live a
        long time!

------
jakevoytko
To accomplish this, it helps to keep a list of important problems that haven't
been solved yet. As you hear about incremental improvements, it may suddenly
be within reach, when popular knowledge says otherwise. Online video was
obviously going to be a killer app: one Victoria's Secret Live fashion show
brought the Internet to its knees several years before Youtube existed. There
just wasn't a way to do it well before the cards fell into place: Flash video
cut through the Gordian Knot of browser video plugins, and low-cost server
infrastructures finally became cheap enough to store petabytes of video. The
casual observer may miss the events, and many may jump in too early, but it
helps to know what problems need to be solved.

~~~
freakwit
What sort of problems are people thinking of?

SSDs have been a big speed improvement - have they enabled new developments?

~~~
jfarmer
RethinkDB thinks so.

------
bl4k
I don't believe this theory of 'build what had previously not been possible'
because it is not true and does not match evidence.

An example is the readiness of markets. Many successful web 2.0 companies were
re-implementations of old dot-com ideas, with the technology being the same
(bar frameworks that minimized development time) but with a more ready user
market and refined implementations.

For example: XDrive - Dropbox, Friendster, theGlobe.com etc. - Facebook, Yahoo
bookmarks - delicious, boo.com - etsy, etc., webvan - amazon delivery, etc.
etc.

Further, many of the technologies cited are old (GPS is almost 40 years old).
It is economies of scale that resulting from market acceptance that make these
technologies more viable. Most software products do not require bleeding edge
technology, which is often a curse (ie. using HTML5 today when 80% of browsers
do not support it).

If you think about what made YouTube, Facebook et al successful, it wasn't
some magic new technology, it was the right implementation and market
acceptance.

This bit has been done to death, but what is different today is:

* It is faster to develop apps because developer time is more efficient and scalable because of tools, but there is nothing in RoR, Django etc. that couldn't have been done 5 years ago with PHP (and I mean that in the end result, not how it is done).

* Broadband penetration (especially globally)

* Browser penetration (IE5 introduced xmlhttprequest in 98, but it took 7 years to reach a decent use base for Ajax apps to be viable)

If you went by the advice here and intoduced a bleeding-edge Ajax app that was
bandwidth heave would have failed in 2000 (and they did, we would use
xmlhttprequest for intranets only).

The risk with this advice is entrepreneurs betting on new over better and
becoming complacent in believing that what they have as _better_ and
'previously not possible' should win.

(edit: so I guess you could say 'build what had previously not gained market
but would today because of tech penetration')

~~~
zwetan
> If you think about what made YouTube, Facebook et alsuccessful, > it wasn't
> some magic new technology, > it was the right implementation and market
> acceptance.

I would have put that as the right implementation at the right time

many implementations will fail simply because of being too much ahead of time

the "right time" imho is not only about market acceptance or market
penetration it's also about "when people are ready to accept it".

Before google decided to use xmlhttprequest for gmail, nobody would want to
use it because it was considered "IE only", but once google used it, it gave
xmlhttprequest a certain credibility and then suddenly everyone started to use
it and then the word "Ajax" was created.

In another context, take smartphone publishing their location in foursquare or
whatever, it's not only because they have the technology to do it (GPS), it's
also related to social acceptance, after people got used to display their
personnal infos on facebook, myspace, etc. then it is just a little jump to
accept to display their geolocation.

I do believe in "build what had previously not been possible" but it's not
only because of technology or market penetration, there is also a big "social
acceptance at the right time" parameter.

------
Eliezer
One of the first genuinely hopeful bits of entrepreneurial thinking I've
clicked to on Hackernews in quite a while, something that applies only to
people who are thinking up highly original ideas likely to create lots of new
economic value, and not to people doing the same stuff everyone else is doing
in hopes of a quick cashout.

------
jsmcgd
Generally good advice - although I would say that there are things that
haven't been built today that could have been built yesterday and that could
be the building blocks of tomorrow. Facebook and YouTube are two examples that
weren't built using state of the art technology, that could have been built a
few years earlier. I think their success was in their execution not the
conception of the ideas as they weren't actually original ideas but well
polished ones.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
YouTube is actually interesting. They attribute their rise to a few building
blocks: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssfmTo7SZg>

I wouldn't put all of these as some sort of future stack building blocks, but
there were enough things there that made something possible, that wasn't
possible before: easy video sharing.

1- broadband in the home 2- emergence of flash, so no codecs required 3-
proliferation of digital cameras 4- cheap hosting 5- one click upload 6-
ability to share embed

~~~
polynomial
I'll just leave this here. <http://bit.ly/cOGT5n>

~~~
asmosoinio
Full link: <http://www.youtube.com/v/kfEzHdWKOoQ>

------
oozcitak
Also worth considering: Build what is possible today in US but not in
Europe/Asia. i.e. Watch what your fellow US entrepreneurs are working on and
adopt it to your local.

~~~
patio11
There are any number of opportunities to bring e.g. Japan into the 21st
century. By the by, this is true for lots of folks demographically dissimilar
to this forum in the US. JavaScript is cutting edge in my market, no joke.

~~~
Qz
Why would we want to bring Japan back from the 22nd century to this mess?

------
jodrellblank
I like the headline idea, but still wonder when you say:

 _: If 9/11 happened in 2010, how much different would it have been? It took
forever to know what was going on as the channels of TV and Radio weren’t fast
enough. The web wasn’t ubiquitous and the ability to publish as fast as today
was not there_

I was watching it on TV and hanging around on the Ars Technica forum, but I
can't really imagine my life would have been much different if I hadn't heard
about it for a month.

Similarly, location based services - there seems a huge limit to what kinds of
software could be much improved by being location aware.

Is this me being unimaginative or are you just picking interesting sounding
things and saying they must be futurestack components because they exist?

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Well a few things:

* The tragedy would have been the same. By no means (and i don't think you are implying that I am either) saying tech today would have prevented it. * The zero delay of information flow would have made things a lot less hectic for everyone. At the time the towers fell there was a massive panic of finding where everyone was and if they were okay. I could imagine a popular hashtag emerging such as: #imokay . It wasn't possible to broadcast to all of your friends in a matter of seconds if you were okay in 2001.

*I think we've scratched the surface of how locational context can improve most things. If we can organize and provide context to information in the real world, the same way we have to the digital world, that will be big.

~~~
user24
The web was still pretty grown up in 2001 - admittedly no facebook or twitter;
the idea of immediate spread of information through non-traditional routes was
not widespread.

I checked cnn and bbc news for information (both of which went down several
times that day I might add)

But I really doubt twitter would stay up if a 9/11-scale event happened today.
Even facebook I'm not sure about. If the CNN site couldn't handle the traffic
I can only imagine what that spike looked like.

"It wasn't possible to broadcast to all of your friends in a matter of seconds
if you were okay in 2001."

well, there was - cell phones and SMS. Those networks went down too (source:
<http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0153.htm> )

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
SMS was certainly there, but nowhere near the usage that it has today.

~~~
user24
Hmm, apparently the UK were 4 years ahead of the US in terms of SMS adoption
(source: [http://www.intomobile.com/2007/07/23/americans-
are-4-years-b...](http://www.intomobile.com/2007/07/23/americans-are-4-years-
behind-the-uk-in-terms-of-sms-adoption/)) so maybe you're right. Certainly
felt to me like SMS was well established in the UK in the 2000s.

------
saturdaysaint
Augmented reality (and similar vision-AI applications) deserves a mention
here. It brings together many things that weren't possible "yesterday" - fast
mobile processing, location awareness, new sensor hardware (anything from
cameras to accelerometers and gyroscopes is applicable), social/web data...

------
volski
_When looking at an idea it’s useful to ask yourself: “Would it have been
possible to build this company 12-18 months ago?”_

This reads like a list of stuff that has been possible for a lot longer than
12-18 months:

    
    
      Direct Access To Customers
      Anything as a Service
      Always Connected
      Zero Barrier Distribution
      Social Context
      Assume The Device Is Portable
      Location Aware...
    

I'd say dig a bit more, all this stuff was possible in Feb 09. You have the
right approach, but the wrong examples.

------
todayiamme
I loved the article, but there is subtle problem troubling me over here.

How do you build the previously impossible without knowing the real extent to
what is possible, or not possible? It's one thing to see trends, but quite
another to take in depth domain specific knowledge across multiple
interconnected topics and form a picture out of them. I can sit here and talk
about trends in a lot of industries, but questions like sustainability, future
growth require that picture. You need to get it.

It takes a lot of time to do that and there really is no way to escape it.
(It's pretty awesome if you fail though, at least you learn something out of
it)

However, what happens if you're in a crunch and you're trying to enter an
unknown field? You can't assimilate information at a reasonably fast pace, and
what you do learn will have a greater probability attached to being
inaccurate/flawed. Importantly, you won't have the complete means to detect
it.

I am asking this because pretty often I find that most of the overlooked
problems lie in the intersections of things, and I've realized that it's
really important to know how to bridge that gap before jumping in.

~~~
brianpan
The building blocks he lists are things that are possible _right now_. It's
not a matter of figuring out the future, but rather seeing technology trends
and creating a unique mix of those things that were previously impossible. It
doesn't have to be in an unknown field or about unfamiliar topics. Technology
changes many things, as it changes, can you do something new now?

This shifts the problem from the difficult (predict the future) to the
straightforward (applying building blocks). It's not an automatic business
plan or a bullet-proof vest, but the unwritten assumption is that by looking
for the opportunities in the changing tide, anything you create will already
have a first-mover advantage by default.

------
BobbyH
Other good building blocks to use are Hadoop (map/reduce) and Lucene/Solr
(search).

P.S. Great post.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Would you put Hadoop under scaleable to billions?

~~~
BobbyH
Yeah, Hadoop is parallelizable by design, so it's just a matter of renting out
EC2 clusters. In any case, I'm not talking about competing with Cloudera, but
using Hadoop in some new specific vertical. For instance, an ad network that
uses Hadoop could mine user/user-clickstream data better and get more clicks.
That would be using Hadoop as a building block. You could also use Hadoop to
power awesome analytics on, say, an e-commerce platform.

~~~
ynniv
It is off topic and my (irrelevant) personal preference, but please, pretty
pretty please, find something more beneficial to humanity than convincing
people to purchase things that they don't need. Innovation is exciting when it
is about ending a war, or reducing pollution, or creating cheaper energy, or
making it easier to find information. Every time people talk about "mining the
clickstream to increase ad revenue" I have the temporary urge to abandon
computing become a farmer.

kthxbye

~~~
mikeklaas
Greed has done more to improve humanity's standard of living than philanthropy
ever will.

~~~
ynniv
_Greed has done more to improve humanity's standard of living than
philanthropy ever will._

Standard of living, sure. Quality of life... not so much.

------
adw
This is why the media and information markets are so compelling. Find an
existing entrenched player, identify the disruptive technology they used to
enter the market (often it's something like motorcycle couriers), identify the
technology which disrupts that advantage...

------
jeromec
Hey Jason (or anyone else) SMS was mentioned as part of immediate
communications. Is this true yet today? A sticking point for me with SMS was
that messages were randomly subject to hours of delay upon being sent because
of the SMS distribution system. It's because of that along with knowing that
far more robust (and free) email on devices was on the way that I never got
behind SMS. However, I now have something in mind which could apply SMS, since
it's available to more phone types, but it needs to be immediate. I did a
check on Google, and the FAQ at Twilio as well, but can't find whether this
potential lag is still there. Does anyone have insight on this?

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
I think it's at the point of immediate, but subject to delays just like any
other technology. I haven't had an SMS delay in quite a while.

I would curious to see more insight into the history of SMS, technology behind
it,etc. Wikipedia does an okay job. Correct me if I'm wrong, but SMS does not
use the data network? I have been able to send sms messages with no data
service before.

~~~
jeromec
Yes, from when I looked into it the bottleneck seemed to be the SMSC (short
message service center), which receives the message then sends it out to users
when they are available. Apparently, SMSC's often became overloaded with the
popularity of SMS. You're right, SMS I believe takes place on a separate
mobile network rather than the open Internet, which is why it's subject to the
fees and different behavior. I'm at a point where I'm torn between writing SMS
technology off in favor of email, or considering it for certain things,
because we're still a long way away from everyone comfortably accessing their
email via mobile.

------
callmeed
_"Transactions <= .99 Microtransactions used to be a pain in the ass."_

I would argue they still are–especially on the mobile web. I was talking about
this with a co-worker ... unless you want to give Apple 30% of an in-app
purchase, it seems there's no easy way to sell an item or subscription on your
phone. People don't want to enter their billing information–especially on a 3"
screen.

Until we have some sort of secure/universal/mobile "ONE-CLICK" purchase
solution that doesn't include usurious rates, microtransactions will continue
to be a pain.

Facebook and Amazon are the only ones I could see pulling it off–though maybe
it shouldn't be a single corporation doing it.

~~~
portman
Are you aware of PayPal's Micropayments feature? $0.05 plus 5%, meaning a
$0.99 purchase only costs 9 cents (they round down).

<https://micropayments.paypal-labs.com/>

Note: this is the third time I've posted this link on HN in about 5 months,
but each time people have thanked me for it so at risk of looking like a
shill, here we go again...

~~~
callmeed
Yes, I'm aware of it ... but it's not the solution I'm seeking.

------
fookyong
Off topic, but I absolutely cannot stand the way that this site renders and
behaves on an iPad. What's wrong with it? It wobbles all over the place and
the text looks non-native and jagged.

Sort it out, Baptiste!

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
yikes, not good. it's being done through PadPressed.com , app we released last
week. Just put out a new version and it's using a new cached plugin. Can you
please email me a screenshot: j@jasonlbaptiste.com Thanks!

~~~
fookyong
I'm assuming you have an ipad. The problem occurs in landscape mode. Try
scrolling and you'll see what I mean.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Correct. Looking at it now and it looks okay and doesn't wobble. Weird.

~~~
fookyong
Here's how to replicate it on my iPad at least

In landscape mode, put your thumb on the screen and hold it there. Then move
it slightly to the left and stop. The page continued shifting despite the fact
that I'm not dragging anymore and eventually it just shunts itself off the
screen entirely.

------
niico
Build something that had previews not been built is unnecessary. There is a
whole universe of possibilities with APIs, mashups or re-doing something with
your own twist.

------
valkyrja
I'd love to see some built that is not for profit in this day and age. Not to
be overly negative. Perhaps it should be build what you want, not what earns
the most.

------
DaniFong
Build what had previously not been needed.

