
A Question - philip1209
http://blog.samaltman.com/a-question
======
stonogo
Ten years ago? Not sure. I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls
over my GSM phone, chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc. Literally
nothing in this post is in any way amazing to anyone who actually remembers
life ten years ago. We had smartphones. We had social media. We had web
forums. Just because you've dumped money into some of them doesn't make them
special or even interesting from a technology standpoint.

I, too, support SpaceX (as well as Orbital Sciences, Virgin Galactic, etc) but
pretending that reddit is even anywhere near that list as far as being
"unimaginably fantastic" is either depressingly credulous or else clumsy false
optimism.

Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on
general-purpose computing; all the brands names he's slinging around amount to
a celebration of the black-boxing of internet services. Ten years ago I could
do all this stuff without _needing_ a quad-core 2GHz phone to run a full-
featured HTML5/CSS/JS browser platform.

More generally, in cars, computers, and most other sectors in technology,
things are getting less and less accessible to casual interest or even
moderately-dedicated hobbyists. Sometimes it's in the name of efficiency,
sometimes it's in the name of corporate control, but with the exception of the
Tesla, everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form. It was
just easier to learn the internals, then, when programs were programs, instead
of HTTP APIs, and circuits were circuits, instead of closely-held intellectual
properties. When was the last time anyone bought an appliance of any sort that
had the wiring diagram pasted to the inside of the case?

Sorry Sam, things are prettier now, but there's nothing new under the sun.

~~~
wildermuthn
> I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls over my GSM phone,
> chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc.

As an early-adopter with sufficient income to afford whatever gadget you're
talking about, I'm sure you found a lot of utility communicating with the <1%
of our population that shared your position and enthusiasm. The other 99% of
us had land-lines. Only some of us had the internet.

> Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on
> general-purpose computing

I have no idea what you're talking about. Our society is now saturated with
computers. We carry computers in our pockets that we casually call 'smart'.
These devices are wirelessly connected in a global network that we casually
call 'the internet'. Computing is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it
anymore.

> Sorry Sam, things are prettier now, but there's nothing new under the sun .
> . . everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form.

Yes, the retina display existed in some form: in low-contrast PDA displays.
Yes, 4G and 100mps broadband existed in some form: as in, dial-up screeching.
Yes, Reddit existed in some form, as in your local BBS.

Sometimes difference of degree are so great that they become differences of
kind, precisely because they make further technological innovations possible.
Any startup that hinges upon "network-effects" knows this. Anyone who's used
an Oculus Rift has experienced it.

There's nothing new under the sun? Only if you're living in the past.

~~~
untog
_There 's nothing new under the sun?_

I don't think anyone is suggesting that nothing is new. Just that nothing is
_mind-blowingly_ new. As you say, the last ten years have seen a lot of
improvements in existing concepts - connections are faster, displays are
better, etc. etc.

But that's not the kind of mind blowing change Sam suggests that it is. If you
had told me ten years ago that tech would look like it does today I would say
"yep, sounds about right".

~~~
wildermuthn
I think the Oculus Rift is certainly mind-blowing. Also the fact that I can
work remotely effectively.

Thinking on this further, the difference between 10 years and 20 years is
immense: 2004 vs 1994. Maybe we just need another 10 years to see how far
we've really come since 2004. We are only just beginning to experience what
happens when you connect the global population wirelessly.

~~~
modoc
I was working remotely effectively starting in '98-'99\. DSL + VPN + Thinkpad
+ cell phone + etc...

~~~
schandur
Heck, back in 2004, I was using a Nokia 3650 to SSH to one of our servers and
make configuration changes to our backup software. While riding in a car.

------
diego
Sam is probably too young to remember what the world was like before the
internet. From my perspective (just turned 45), the technological change in
everyday life between 1994 and 2004 is _much_ more significant than the
incremental improvements in the past 10 years.

\- In 1994 I didn't even have dialup internet; in 2004 I had a reliable 1 mbps
connection.

\- In 1994 I knew few people with mobile phones; in 2004 I had one with a
color screen (Motorola v600) that could search Google and take pictures.

Facebook and Twitter did not exist, but the basic entertainment and
communication functions they provide are not radically different from those of
online forums, chatrooms, email, older social networks.

The main difference that Sam overlooks is that in 2004 all this was not
available to hundreds of millions (billions?) of people in the world, just
like the internet was not (or barely) available to me in 1994.

~~~
patrickk
A lot of the so-called innovation of the past 10 years seems to purely
piggyback on Moore's Law, cheaper storage and cheaper bandwidth, i.e.
incremental, sometimes useful improvements via the web, but no nanotech robots
that detect cancer, Mars base, nuclear fusion, etc.

Innovation seems to have stalled in the world of atoms, cars (and transport
generally), houses, healthcare etc all not noticeably improving, except
incrementally (deliberately ignoring Tesla, which will hopefully have a
widespread impact on the entire car industry in the coming years).

Some areas have gotten worse overall, such as finance, which seems to be
disconnected from creating value for the wider economy and seems to be getting
more unstable and risky as time progresses.

EDIT: I don't mean to sound overly negative, some of the YC RFSs sound quite
ambitious, I hope they succeed in attracting more of those types of companies
funded and off the ground
[https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

~~~
spindritf
_A lot of the so-called innovation of the past 10 years seems to purely
piggyback on Moore 's Law_

If you believe Robin Hanson, maybe even all software innovation ever.

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/06/why-does-hardware-
grow...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/06/why-does-hardware-grow-like-
algorithms.html)

------
jacquesm
I think the question isn't whether or not we innovate enough, the question
should be whether Sam believes that YC is funding start-ups that will one day
become the new Tesla or SpaceX.

From the previous batches I don't recall a single one that ever stood a chance
of that, though there are plenty of new middlemen and some neat innovations.
Most of the really interesting ones died off very quickly.

SpaceX and Tesla required massive investments, the long view, a very unique
founder and good timing all in one package. If they had been YC funded
companies rather than companies funded by a founder that could personally dump
a fortune in them when nobody else cared they would have sank long ago.

So I don't think that YC will fund a Tesla or a SpaceX, the model is not
particularly suitable for such long haul and extremely risky ventures.

But they'll clean up on making a bunch more companies like Dropbox, AirBnb and
so on over the next decade.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Their fusion companies have an outside chance at it.

The frustrating thing about this piece is that there's certainly a case to be
made that VCs are funding some innovative companies with wild potential to
change the world.

This piece doesn't come close to making that case. Instead it's just kind of
whiny.

~~~
jacquesm
I should put some time in this and go over the roster of YC companies over the
last years to pick out the ones that I thought were _really_ moving the
needle. I suspect that the kind of secondary investors that would put money
into a YC backed and vetted company are the kind that are looking to exit in
the near future, not the kind that intend to see their capital locked in for
decades and that this is one of the reasons why media companies, IT companies
and middle men tend to have a much better chance of success.

Their models are much closer to what the investors are already used to and how
they in turn made their money. Space ships to Mars and electric vehicles do
not at all seem to be a good match for the YC model.

------
pron
> What were you doing 10 years ago?

Pretty much the same, but on platforms with a different name.

Also, the fact that people are using some toy now -- even if they love it --
does not mean it's anything more than a toy. After all -- toys are fun; if
they weren't, they wouldn't have been made. You play with them for a while,
tell people how great they are, and then you move on to newer toys and forget
about them very quickly.

In fact, the very reason many don't remember what they used ten years ago
shows how forgettable these toys are. I can certainly remember what life was
before mobile phones, or before the internet. But before Facebook and
Snapchat? It's kind of hard to remember the name of all those companies that
were sold for a lot of money and then disappeared. We had MySpace, ICQ,
VocalTec, RealMedia -- pretty much the same as today.

~~~
VLM
Speaking of platforms, user behavior hasn't changed at all and front ends
aren't different other than style and name, but back ends have changed a lot.

I'm almost at 10 yrs on my linode cloud account. My servers at work have gone
from hardware to mostly virtual images. I used to store data on spinning rust,
now I put my trust in the NAS guys. NoSQL went from 0 to hyperspeed hype back
down to a normal-ish technology. JVM went from nothing but java to I deploy
scala apps on it and think about deploying clojure apps. GIT has gone from
doesn't exist to every piece of code I write is in git. Puppet is the same age
and trajectory. About 9 years ago I started my first ruby on rails project. If
you told me a decade ago that I'd be paying for an account to store my version
control repos I'd say you're kidding, but here I am a github subscriber.

------
gaurav_v
I work in a 'top' neuroscience lab in which we study the nature of neural
computations theoretically and experimentally, the kind of thing that you may
consider Super Duper Really Serious attempts To Innovate.

The things being dismissed in this thread as 'toys' and 'old stuff made
prettier' make our work easier.

Scientists communicate on twitter and via blogs; the open-access movement is
picking up steam this way. It's much easier to decide to move across the world
to work with a particular experimentalist if your mom knows how to use Skype
and you can talk to your grandma from the hospital on her iPad.

Innovation happens in the world, not in a bubble. Making things easier to use
and more appealing to the mainstream is real, extremely valuable progress.

Not to mention that all of the mathematics we use was developed by
mathematicians purely as new, purposeless shiny toys. :)

------
dfine
The best rejoinder to this might be the Founder's Fund manifesto, which
originally started with, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140
characters."

That specific phrase has since disappeared. But it illustrates that we can
enjoy—even invest in—certain innovations like social media, while bemoaning
the lack of innovation in other spaces (eg transportation in this example).

Here's the modified version of the manifesto:

[http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future/](http://www.foundersfund.com/the-
future/)

------
ible
I recently went on a trip to Paris (~250BC). Finding commercial flights (1969)
and good hotels took minutes and I didn't need to talk to anyone
(hipmunk(2010)/tripadvisor(2001)). I checked out the area around the hotel
(1950) on Google street view (2007). My family kept up to date on where I was
via find my friends (2011) on my iPhone (2007). My phone showed me where I was
through Google Maps (2005) and directed my with a built in compass (2009?). I
used city mapper (2011) to figure out how to get around efficiently on the
Paris metro (1900). The trip was noticably different from my last one. Last
time to take decent pictures I carried a consumer affordable DSLR (2007), this
time I carried my iPhone 5. In 2007 I tried to take panoramas and had to very
carefully take individual shots and stitch them together laboriously in
software afterwards that took hours to run. This time I took one on my phone
and shared it with my family 30 seconds later. I took hand held time lapse
videos. I live translated signs with WordLens (2010) after failing to learn
much French with DuoLingo (2011). I could go on and on like this about all the
changes. Many in the last 10 years or less.

Yes I could have done basically everything I did this time last time. Maps and
compasses aren't new. There were tour guides available, and smart phones, and
language classes. But the experience was qualitatively different.

If I was feeling early adopter instead of like relaxing maybe I could've done
some things that weren't possible last time, like driven in an electric car
that is among the best performance cars in the world, tested self stopping or
self parking or self driving cars, toured with a consumer VR rig, taken a
video with a self-piloting quadracopter, or gotten my genome sequenced, or
watched a streaming video from the space station, or....

That's what I could come up with in a few minutes while writing this comment
and searching on wikipedia. If you can't get excited about all the innovations
happening right now oh boy are you doing it wrong.

------
spindritf
That's a very good point but weak examples. USENET was not just comparable but
better than Reddit.

I like more succinct version of that observation by Marc Andreessen

 _Tech only serves rich nerds w / $$$ products. Same things show up later at
huge volumes & low prices for everyone. But those are unrelated._

[https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/528723742940073986](https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/528723742940073986)

------
will_brown
It seems odd to use Tesla and SpaceX as the counter example to "building toys
for rich people".

Tesla and SpaceX are exactly that...toys for rich people. But who cares? Look
at the Wright brothers building the first controllable, fixed-wing, powered
aircraft...that was a toy for rich people. Tesla and SpaceX technologies to
become accessible to the masses likely need to start out as toys for rich
people. To paraphrase Henry Ford, if I had listened to what the people wanted
I would have given them faster horses.

------
bokonist
Sam left out the two innovations that have made the most difference to my life
in the past 10 years:

1) the Google Library project, which scanned tens of millions of books and
made them free online. 2) ebook readers (first the Kindle, and now AMOLED or
super high res smartphones)

I now have access to so much human knowledge, and can take this vast library
anywhere.

Much of the other great innovation in the last ten years were in expansions or
second versions of existing ideas:

1) Stackoverflow is so much better than experts exchange and random forums. 2)
Wikipedia is infinitely better than about.com 3) Between Crashplan, Dropbox,
and OSX time machine, backups are in much better shape now. I never worry
about losing my files. 4) Smart phones were not life changing, but they did
save the annoyance of printing directions and then carrying a moleskin,
crossword puzzle, paperback book, etc, everywhere I go. 5) Yelp and Amazon
reviews are so much more extensive now, making accessing high quality products
so much easier. 6) Goole maps now support transit directions. Finding the
right city bus or set of stops to take when traveling is much easier.

Some things have gotten worse. I think newsgroups+AIM+IRC+blogs&RSS were
better than Twitter/Facebook/Reddit. Obviously, many will disagree.

Right now, the biggest area we need innovation in is in food and energy. In
most other spaces, we are reduced to solving the most minor of "first world
problems". Major kudos to Sam and to YC for actually investing in energy
startups in the recent rounds.

------
Alex3917
> massive wealth inequality is likely to be the biggest social problem of our
> time

The problem is that it's a cycle.

High wealth inequality -> large percentage of population with low SES ->
structural forces perpetuating inequality -> ...

Already you see the Republican party copying the tactics that tehran used to
turn persia into an islamic republic with great success, due to the systemic
issues above, so it's hard to see how this is going to end well.

~~~
philovivero
I find this fascinating and want to read more, but you haven't given me a lot
to go on. Any references? What is SES?

~~~
Alex3917
SES is socioeconomic status, i.e. a combination of wealth and education.

In terms of reading more about what's going on in the US in general, the best
sources of information are probably just the (often yearly) reports put out by
the major governmental agencies: the CDC, the Department of Education, the
DoJ, the EPA, etc.

------
waterlesscloud
Facebook- over 10 years old.

Twitter- 8 years old.

Reddit - 9 years old.

------
SnacksOnAPlane
I don't think people are saying that smartphones or Uber or even Reddit aren't
terrific innovations. They are.

They're complaining about stuff like this:
[http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/10/and-the-winner-of-
techcrunc...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/10/and-the-winner-of-techcrunch-
disrupt-sf-2014-is-alfred/)

One of the biggest competitions in the tech scene, and it's won by a personal
butler service. Not even a robot butler; just a way to order a person to do
your bidding for below the rate that you would ordinarily have to pay.

Not to mention all the money wasted on new advertising platforms, and startups
that say they'll "change the world" through some trivial, stupid iPhone app.
There's too much bluster and people don't get called out on it enough.

------
untog
The last ten years have not been that notable. The biggest change has been the
speed and power of mobile devices - the advent of 3G (then LTE) has opened up
a lot of opportunities. But that has nothing to do with Reddit, Facebook,
Twitter or any of the other startups Sam mentions - it was technology
developed by boring old large companies.

Ten years ago I had a Nokia Symbian phone that (if I recall) could only
connect over GPRS. Could still check e-mail fine, though. I was using MSN
Messenger to communicate with friends instead of Twitter. I uploaded my photos
to Photobucket instead of Dropbox. I ripped CDs to MP3s instead of paying for
Spotify.

Yes, there has been innovation. But it's nowhere near as remarkable as Sam
makes it - it's simply easier to do things than it used to be.

------
the_economist
Perhaps the most unintended consequence of these innovations will have the
most profound impact: keeping our youth from turning themselves into
criminals.

Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the leading theory is that it's
because all the kids are too busy on their electronic devices to commit any
crimes.

"Arrests of juveniles for all offenses decreased 15.5 percent in 2013 when
compared with the 2012 number"

[http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-
the-u.s/2013/c...](http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-
the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/persons-arrested/persons-arrested)

~~~
king_jester
> Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the leading theory is that it's
> because all the kids are too busy on their electronic devices to commit any
> crimes.

I have never heard that theory at all from any crime reporting, statistics, or
books. Do you have any information on that?

~~~
toby
Agreed, I'm fascinated by this theory but I can't find a single reference to
it.

------
alexvr
Useful things are wonderful, even if they're obvious and not new or even
innovative. The problem is _considering_ things like Snapchat, Facebook,
Reddit, and Twitter innovative when they're absolutely not. They're
fundamentally simple communication channels that almost anyone could create,
thanks largely to Internet pioneers and open source developers. Their users
and public image make them valuable.

I'm very happy we have these things, and I'm happy they're well-designed and
secure. But they're not really innovative.

------
larrys
"I have a question for all the people that use their iPhone or Android to
complain on Twitter, Facebook, or reddit about the lack of innovation… "

This reminds me a bit when the Nightly News runs a story about something and
then adds "but critics say it's not enough and doesn't go far enough".

Who are the "critics" exactly? Critics are easy to find.

Critics are visible and get attention. But never do I see any quantification
of how many people actually "complain on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit about
the lack of innovation". Or even care.

------
FiatLuxDave
I don't want to get into the argument about whether there has been digital
innovation in the last ten years, but I'd like to note an observation about
the 'world of atoms' vs. 'world of bits' statement.

One of silicon valley's strengths has been its tolerance for failure.
Typically, if you found a startup and it goes under, you pick yourself back up
and just get a job at a different startup or a big corp. However, I'm not so
sure that this strength exists in the world of atoms to the same extent as in
the world of bits. Perhaps it's because non-digital skills are less fungible,
or perhaps it's because the valley is so crowded by the digital crowd that
there in no room for a critical mass of atom-wranglers, but I suspect that the
typical failure path for non-digital startups involves leaving the valley, or
at least leaving the startup ecosystem.

Perhaps Sam could speak more to this difference between the worlds of bits and
atoms in the future. I know that YC is looking to do more innovative work in
the world of atoms, and I laud this. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who
has noticed how much more successful the valley has been at bits than atoms
since the 90s. I know that VCs would like to do more innovation with the
atoms. But silicon valley seems to lack something when it comes to atoms that
they have with bits. It's not the VCs; they are present and ready. Maybe it's
something else.

------
foobarqux
People who say we don't have innovation don't literally mean we have nothing
new, they mean that the rate, scale or impact of innovation is much less than
in preceding decades. This sentiment has been expressed outside of the tech
world also: Larry Summers maintains that we are in a period of long term
economic stagnation.

I don't know if the claims, as they relate to tech, are true; maybe someone
should actually present some convincing evidence for it instead of vaguely
pointing to Snapchat.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Part of the problem is we know what is significant today, when we look back.
1904 to 1914? Heavier-than-air flight, cheap automobiles, rural
electrification. 1914-1924? Radio, airlines, diesel railroad engines, moving
pictures. 1924-1934? Television, talkies, commercial radio. 1934-1944? Nuclear
power, commercial TV, colour films, antibiotics. 1944-1954? Jet aircraft,
nuclear weapons, commercial nuclear power. 1954-1964? Space travel, colour TV,
bipolar junction transistors, vaccination programmes. 1964-1974? Lunar
landing, commercial supersonic flight, microchips. 1974-1984? Microcomputers,
modern medical imaging, minimally invasive surgery. 1984-1994? Internet,
e-mail. 1994-2004? Commercial Internet. 2004-2014? Who knows? Ask me again in
ten years.

In 2004, in the wake of the .com crash, the future of the commercial Internet
was not clear. Furthermore, the argument for slowing down of innovation is not
entirely implausible. The big, foundational innovations like bipolar junction
transistors, microchips, microcomputers and the Internet do seem to trail off
in recent decades. For all the medical advances we have achieved nothing can
touch anti-biotics and vaccines in terms of impact. They aren't even close to
the same category.

The transistor is an interesting case for people who claim there is nothing
new under the sun: transistor ideas had been around since the '20's, but it
wasn't 'til the late '40's that they were "invented" and it was the early
'50's that Shockley's innovation made it possible for them to go mainstream.
Shockley didn't "invent" "the transistor", but he did invent something that
was such a great improvement on existing technology that when we use the word
"transistor" we are generally referring to his invention, even though that is
not the most general use of the word.

It is perfectly likely that there was at least one world-changing invention in
2004-2014, but it'll be another decade before we can say with any certainty
what it is.

~~~
foobarqux
I have a hard time believing any of the pre-1974 inventions were not known to
be important almost immediately. BJTs are perhaps the only exception.

------
UweSchmidt
I still have my sense of wonder when I look at that the hardware, for example
the magic supercomputer from the future that is my old Samsung S3 mini. People
should really drop their smartphones less.

Culturally we've lost quite a bit of empowerment that the personal computer
brought. The loss of privacy and the distinct awareness of an entity in the
background collecting all data is always on my mind.

------
protomyth
The WeLL, BIX, and BBSes predated the web, and my sub-$200 computer was doing
a fine job of it. Newsgroups were a thing.

I love all the tech advances, but just because the old tech wasn't as widely
disbursed doesn't mean people weren't doing things that happen today.

I remember a old Byte magazine on conferencing and it had a lot of stuff that
is basically todays messaging networks.

------
filmgirlcw
Sam's question is interesting, but I think that as much as the world has
changed in 10 years, it's also important to remember how much it hasn't.

I was doing a lot of the stuff I do now 10 years ago. Hell, I had a Rhapsody
streaming music account and it hooked up to my TiVo, an XBMP-laden Xbox and a
Denon system in 2003. And I was AIMing with friends on my cell phone in 2003
too.

But let's roll back the "I'm so l33t and the world isn't that great today"
rhetoric for a second and look at why I think the real innovation argument has
happened.

Where were you FIVE years ago. What were you doing then?

And in that case, with the exception of Instagram and Uber (and to a lesser-
degree, Slack), almost everything I use, every service I pay for and every
entity that is part of my daily life was around 5 years ago and was, more
often than not, something that I used then too.

That isn't to say that the future isn't great and that there aren't
improvements (and massive ones) to those services. But Dropbox, Facebook,
Twitter, Android, iOS, Spotify, Tumblr, WordPress, Drupal, Skype, Evernote,
Hulu, Netflix and the other countless services that exist now, existed then.
They weren't all as awesome then as they are now, of course, but the stuff was
there.

I don't write this to belittle Sam's point, but to mention that the way we
judge what we use and how we use it is changing so fast that I think a decade
can be too broad to look at to consider "innovation."

So if I'm comparing what we use today and what will exist in 5 years, or will
be a "threshold" moment in ten years, we look at what's available and if I'm
honest, I'm not sure what has happened in the last few years that is of
YouTube level of game changing.

YouTube, Netflix streaming, Uber, Tinder (I suppose, I'm married so I haven't
used it but my friends who use it have had their social lives changed by it),
Facebook -- these are truly paradigm-altering services (and yes, Facebook
wasn't the first or even an early social network but it is paradigm altering
in the sense that its' the first service that literally everyone joined, thus
making it feel necessary). If I look at something like Snapchat (just to pick
on them because I'm not a fan), I don't see anything paradigm shifting about
it. That doesn't mean it doesn't become a permanent thing in the future, but
it's not like Dropbox or YouTube.

And as an analyst, that's what I want to see more of and what I'm not really
seeing over the last few years (with the exception of VR stuff).

------
jimbokun
I think in a post-Snowden world, innovation in information sharing and access
technologies is met with a lot more skepticism and cynicism.

I was actually surprised how cynical the coverage of Amazon's Echo was. I
expected to see at least some geeking out about the specs or the engineering
that went into it. But the conversation was dominated by half-serious-jokes
and comments about increasing Amazon's ability to sell you stuff, and giving
the NSA and much higher fidelity recording of our daily conversations.

I believe we have now passed the point where the first questions we ask about
new products and technologies aren't about how cool and innovative they are,
but cynical questions about what the corporations selling them are really up
to.

------
ratsimihah
Maybe it can't be helped. YC, for example, needs to make money to keep
existing. To make money, it needs to invest in companies that are likely to
make profit. But the best way for companies to make profit isn't to innovate,
is it? It's to find an audience and some business model and all that c*p I
know nothing about, but that I feel yields companies and products that "lack
[...] innovation," as some complained.

Maybe, if we weren't so money driven and more of us could afford to build
things for the sake of innovation and progress only, the results would be
different.

But I do concur, that there is at least one exciting and relevant problem that
remains unsolved in the world of bits. A problem you're well aware of. :)

------
imgabe
What was _I_ doing 10 years ago? That's beside the point. I'm in the top 1%
global wealth-wise, as are most people who are able to use the services
mentioned. What were people in the other 99% doing 10 years ago?

------
andywood
What's happening now?

We all carry cel phones that are also personal computers, MP3 players, and
gaming machines. They're made by Apple, Microsoft, and Google (which started
as a search engine, like Lycos. Kurzweil and Berners-Lee work there now.)
Apple's and Google's run 'nix. Apple's and Microsoft's are pretty hi-fi
miniatures of their respective flagship OSes - in fact, in Microsoft's case,
things flipped upside down and the phone UI design started driving the
desktop.

TL;DR: Pocket PCs. Unix, Linux, "Windows"

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yurylifshits
Roughly speaking, most advancements come in two stages

    
    
        — initial technology breakthrough
    
        — building massive companies for mainstream markets
    

These stages can be 10 years apart from each other.

Companies like Dropbox and Uber are commercializing advancements of the last
decade. It's easy to criticize them as "lacking any serious innovation".

At the same time, scientists make serious advancements on materials like
graphene. But few people at HN notice this progress because massive
commercialization has not started yet.

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marknadal
Interesting, I literally just wrote an article
([https://medium.com/@marknadal/rise-of-the-immutable-
operatin...](https://medium.com/@marknadal/rise-of-the-immutable-operating-
system-f7945b1da993)) on this exact issue the day before.

My conclusion? The exact opposite of Sam's. For the most part I feel like
software has gotten worse while hardware has significantly improved. The one
exception I will make is Dropbox, that has changed my life.

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benchmark6
Uh, I think they mean meaningful innovation, not mobile apps.

When we look back at the last 100 years of innovations, something tells me
Dropbox photo sharing won't make the list.

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mtalantikite
I think you asked the right question but gave the wrong examples for the HN
crowd. Consumer tech doesn't always seem that impressive unless you start
thinking about scale.

Instead, I think you should be pointing out GitHub, AWS, CloudFlare,
Elasticsearch, Stripe, Mailgun, etc.

No one is going to convince me they want to go back to the days of racking
expensive (commodity) servers in a colo and hosting Exim alongside a payments
gateway.

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zeeshanm
I think much of the last decade has been about streamlining information
accessibility. Whoever owns information dominates the market.

It's like in one of those third world countries where a dictator coming to
power would manifest his control over information channels (tv, print, online,
etc) as a first thing. But here corporations are in control in a pretty way.

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norswap
Honestly, all these mobile apps are quite unnecessary, and sometimes downright
annoying or harmful (to productivity, and peace of mind). 10 years ago I used
MSN Messenger, and that was all good. I don't need to be permanently connected
to other people, especially when I'm supposed to be doing something else.

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raldi
More examples of how much the world has changed, and how fast, from an essay I
wrote a few years ago:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/i91og/todays_real_li...](https://www.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/i91og/todays_real_life_is_yesterdays_science_fiction/)

It's already outdated!

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applecore
I'd like to remind Hacker News that the question is rhetorical.

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PabloOsinaga
The same message delivered by Louis CK 10x more effectively
[http://youtu.be/KpUNA2nutbk](http://youtu.be/KpUNA2nutbk)

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no_future
Whats wrong with building toys for rich people? Rich people need to play too.

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graycat
Sorry, Sam, SV doesn't see much in the way of serious, powerful, valuable,
important _innovation_. Or, with some high irony, the real builder of SV, the
US DoD and aerospace, is the real, all-time, unchallenged, unique world-class
example of _innovation_ and in comparison the present SV is a bad joke.

Sam, the rest of innovation is not all about atoms, SnapChat, PInterest,
AirBnb, Uber, iPhone, Android, or Tesla.

For Tesla, I predict that in a few years Tesla will have gone the way of just
another fad, this one only for rich people. Why? The battery technology sucks.
Thus, for the car, the range is too short and the charging time too long,
especially when charging at home. And the battery durability sucks.

One of the main problems with SV innovation is one of the first steps in
innovation -- objective, expert, peer review of the crucial, core technology.
Such reviews are standard and easy to get from the Ph.D. committees of the
world's best research universities, the best journals of original research,
and the NSF, NIH, and DARPA but not from SV, YC, etc. To SV and YC,
_technology_ is just routine software, often in, say, C++ or Python. Might
regard the application of the _technology_ as new as a business but not the
technology itself.

Net, for _innovation_ and _technology_ , SV and YC don't get even half way to
first base.

Hint, hint, hint: _Information technology_ is about, right, _information_ ,
and basically that's not about C++, Python, Tesla, or atoms and instead: And
the candidates are, low gluten diets, Yoga meditation, low carb diets,
following 10 top psychics, feedback from getting out of the building, a
liberal arts education with a lot of attention to the great books, video
games, funding the advantages had only by college dropouts, funding teams that
arrive to work on skateboards, and powerful, valuable, high quality, original
research in pure/applied mathematics. And the winner is (drum roll, please).
Oops, sorry, my iWatch just went dead and I lost the answer. Sorry 'bout that.

Let me know when SV is ready to read a math paper. I have one with a small
typo and will place a bet with you here on HN, $1, that in the next 30 days no
one at a SV VC firm or YC will be able to find the typo.

Then we can move on to noticing some leading examples of L^2, that L^2 is
complete, and how to use that as part of the crucial, core foundation to
building a company worth, say, ballpark, $740 billion. Hint: Divide that in
half and think a little.

From all my time in pure/applied math in research universities, working on
challenging US DoD problems, and in one CS lab, I was around nearly all quite
bright people. Then I got to know about the SV _information technology_ world
and its version of _innovation_ and did a big upchuck and, then, a big laugh.

SV _innovation_? Smoking funny stuff in an echo chamber. Just where does SV
get that really strong funny stuff it smokes?

But, but, but, SV IT VC is making money for its LPs, right? Likely not very
much. Or see

[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-
returns.htm](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.htm)

But, Sam, surely you don't believe that there's any significant interest in
innovation in SV IT, right? I mean, about _innovation_ in SV, you were just
being facetious, just joking, right? Sam, please tell me you were just joking.
If you weren't just going for laughs, then SV IT is worse off than I feared.

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Dewie
> What were you doing 10 years ago?

Wasting my time on Web forums.

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flipstewart
Having a good laugh at how Sam Altman doesn't know what Snapchat is... Would
love to see someone use it to send a message "about how Silicon Valley only
builds toys for rich people."

