

The obsession with next - zdw
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2782-the-obsession-with-next

======
macrael
This is the oldest bias there is. Singling out technology is a bit myopic,
because as far as I can see, every field is obsessed with what's next. The
sciences are an obvious example, the whole point is to discover something new
and present it to your peers. Fashion is another easy example, no one cares
what happened last year, they want to see this year's collection. Art was the
first example I thought of: I once visited a museum in New Zealand filled with
beautiful paintings by people no one has ever heard of. The main reason why?
Their styles were not original. In each painting you could plainly see which
master the artist took after.

Next is exciting and last is boring. That is how it will always be. Hoping
that you are going to be written up in a NEWs paper for making your five year
old product a little faster and more stable is wishful thinking.

This is not to belittle the importance of incremental improvements to existing
products at all. Fixing small bugs and making your software more stable is
incredibly important work that will make your customers happy, and make your
software great. But it is not the New, so don't be surprised when most people
don't care.

~~~
regomodo
"I once visited a museum in New Zealand filled with beautiful paintings."

Was that in "Te Papa"? I saw an exhibition of local artwork, nothing ground-
breaking but most were quite exquisite.

~~~
macrael
I'm pretty sure it was <http://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/>

I'm embarrassed that I don't remember for sure. I was mostly guided about by
my friends that trip.

------
twymer
This post seems inspired from a discussion DHH had on twitter with @obie
(founder of hashrocket) yesterday about people in their positions moving on to
new ventures or staying for the long term of what they helped start.

Obie's position was primarily that it's better to get out of your comfort zone
and continue to create new things.

(Discussion starting from
<http://twitter.com/#!/obie/status/39778057610997760>)

~~~
raghus
Is there way to follow a twitter conversation like a thread on HN with
indented replies? Or maybe a 3rd party site that does that?

~~~
eng
<http://bettween.com/dhh/obie>

------
nhangen
I think the obsession with next comes not because we're obsessed with new, but
because we're excited about it!

New technology, new ideas, new innovation - it's all happening at lightning
speed. We're part of the greatest time in the history of the world IMO, and
that's why we love next - we can't wait to see it.

We're inventing fire, the wheel, and the printing press back to back. Whether
we like it or not, next is the new drug.

~~~
JonnieCache
_> We're part of the greatest time in the history of the world IMO_

That's quite a claim. Technology must be advancing fast if you already have
Muad'Dib's ability to perceive all of human history simultaneously as one
infinite structure extending in both directions. How did I miss Steve Jobs
getting the Arrakis fiefdom?

Or could it be that Now is always the greatest part of history because it's by
definition the only part that you can ever inhabit? Like how your headaches
will always be so much worse than everyone else's because they're happening in
_your head._

~~~
zackham
There's a simple argument to be made that the events that are unfolding in the
course of our lifetimes have resulted in an unprecedented degree of societal
and technological progress than ever before in the history of the world.

You're offering a reasonable critique, but no alternative. I'd love to hear an
argument for another period in history that might be a contender for being as
or more "great".

~~~
gloob
Establishing the groundwork for this discussion:

What do you mean by "societal progress"? Do you mean things like reduction of
poverty, or production of arts, or decrease in the frequency of mass murder,
or some combination of all of the above and more? Or do you mean something
else entirely?

What constitutes "technological progress"? Does the progression from a dozen
websites to ten million constitute meaningful technological progress - is
pushing ten thousand cars off an assembly line twice as progressive as a mere
five thousand? Or do you mean actual innovation? In the case of the latter,
how would you measure the rate of innovation today with that of earlier
periods? (In principle, the number of patents granted per year should give you
a rough idea of this, but (1) patents have only been around for a fairly short
period of time, and (2) their actual value in measuring innovation is highly
disputed).

Finally, you seem to imply in your last paragraph that the "greatness" of an
era is a function of its social and technological progress, and no other
factors. Is this reading correct? Or is the door open to other measures as
well?

------
blehn
The thing about software development is that the technology (tools) changes
faster than you can evolve a product. Integrating new technologies into an
existing product can be a real challenge. If all you do is evolve, there
inevitably comes a point where your product is behind the curve. Basecamp and
Fogbugz are good products that were probably great at some point, but now they
just seem old and crusty compared to products like Asana and Pivotal Tracker.

I'd argue that in order to stay competitive, you need to either evolve rapidly
enough to keep up with the pace of technology (Gmail, Facebook), or rethink
and rebuild the product before it falls behind.

~~~
smikhanov
There are lots of hottest web startups out there that use LAMP as their
primary stack. Even more, first version of Mint.com was written (horror!) in
Java.

The technology stack has absolutely nothing to do with your ability to keep
the pace with competition.

~~~
Nitramp
I'm still pretty sure that if you pick your frameworks and tools right, Java
can be a competitive development framework. If you go all Java Beans, EJB,
etc, you might be in trouble, but it's not so much the language per se.

~~~
mgkimsal
Grails FTW :)

------
edw519
I dunno, 99% of the people I talk to (the rest of the world) is less worried
about what new technology is next than when current technology will work
right. What's next, according to them:

    
    
      - When will the website work for any browser?
      - When will the website talk to the fulfillment system?
      - When will I be able to log in with less than 14 passwords?
      - When will we be able to use our mouse on the Report Writer?
      - When will credit cards go through without problems?
      - When will my phone not drop calls?
      - When will Ticket # 15429 be done?
      - When will my email tell me I have voicemail?
      - When will it take less than 5 minutes to power up?
      - When can I stop worrying about viruses?
      - When will someone stop spam?
      - When will someone in IT listen to my problems, even if they're not cool?

~~~
icefox
You will never be able to stop spam (I assume you mean email). A few years ago
I realized this when looking through my logs I saw emails to ...
bob@domain.com ben@domain.com berry@domain.com ... etc Blindly trying the most
common. I knew then that if I wanted the account name ben I could never
'solve' spam on top of our general email system we have today.

~~~
icefox
For all those who downvoted this how do you 100% 'solve' spam?

~~~
derefr
Public-key channels over e-mail. Think about how your body works: each cell
has certain receptors (a key) and only reads data from objects that are shaped
to plug into those receptors. Thus, random messages can float around in the
bloodstream without every random cell trying to interpret them. Similarly, we
could have an actual "inbox" (a bloodstream) that never gets displayed, and
then channel-specific inboxes that are.

When a spammer begins to spam on a certain channel, a message can be sent via
a secondary channel (maybe a special control channel, or just any combination
of other known channels that hits everyone who had authorized access to the
original channel) to automatically shift just the valid users over to a new
channel, and discard the original. It could be completely invisible from a UI
perspective, with the new channel retaining all the old channel's metadata.

The nice thing is that it's almost entirely compatible with all the e-mail
infrastructure we have now, but also allows for a very convenient use-case if
you're willing to switch to a new UI. The only problem is in people's current
knowledge of, and access to, public-key encryption. If Facebook or another
major identity provider started pushing people to send them public keys and
set up a queriable API for them, that'd be a nice first step toward solving
that.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I didn't fully understand that explanation, but I'm trying to see how a
potential client can contact me using the system you suggest.

And if a potential client can, why can a spammer not?

~~~
jbri
Here's one way: The guy that tried adam@example.com, anna@example.com,
berry@example.com etc., sending basically the same message to each, before
trying ben@example.com is probably not a "potential client".

Then you get into the spam-filtering based on content, which is _already_
successful at preventing massive amounts of spam.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
So I don't see what you're adding. You guarantee that people I know can get
through, which I already do with whitelists, and you require content based
filtering on the rest, which I already do.

So I don't really understand how what you're proposing makes a difference.

------
mtalbot
This is definitely a problem in our culture and the 'what's next' mentality
can end up adding a lot of noise to innovation. New is exciting & fun for
sure, but what's better for business and progress is something novel that is
then flushed out over a relatively long term to become a successful business.
Then the business is in a better place to make huge impact (see Apple...)

------
ozataman
What makes sense depends entirely on the context. Sometimes, it needs to be
realized that it will take time for technologies/solutions to mature. Other
times, it will be more clear that a new technology has high prospects. It also
depends on your team, the business model, the solution, etc.

The other side of the equation is the internal mechanics of large
corporations. There are many that yearn new ideas and any form of innovation,
"stirring of the pot" if you will, after decades of using the same winning
strategy. They realize they are making bets on some new technologies, but the
alternative is to stand back and lose by default. Surely, corporations of all
sizes (and their people) often make strategic mistakes and take the wrong
approach. But they also make some good decisions and there are many examples
of new ideas emerging so fast that they put entire industry categories out of
business.

I don't think it is right to issue blanket statements such as these. They feel
more like a ranting for popularity than well thought-out observation.
Different approaches might have varying levels of value at varying levels in
the value chain. You might have a good strategy that works for you; you don't
need to assault every other approach out there in order to stand out.

------
mattsoldo
Sure, if nothing has changed in the product, the press doesn't want to write
about it, the _news_ is about whats changed in the world.

But what the press does like is hearing about how existing products have made
businesses successful. These stories are about the success of the business as
a result of the product, which is the thing that is changing for companies
with more static products that are very successful.

------
PaulGuz
The economy needs to grow, consequently developers are always going to feel
pressure to make new products and improve current products. The question I
have is, is it better to make products that empower antiquated markets
(anything to do with a fax machine) or develop for new markets (skype) or
invent your own market (?).

------
staunch
I knew Steve Jobs was doing it all wrong!

------
pragmatic
Is it a tad odd that this comes from the RoR guys? Ruby + RoR in the mid to
late 2000's was _the_ next language/framework.

So it's ok for next as long as _you_ benefit, but not if it causes you
inconvenience.

~~~
true_religion
You're accusing them of mercurial morals, but did they ever previously promote
the idea that "next" for the sake of "next" was a good thing?

~~~
stop
_Did they ever previously promote the idea that "next" for the sake of "next"
was a good thing?_

No one ever does that.

~~~
true_religion
How about "Progressivists"? My terminology may be incorrect here, but they
believe that progress will bring a better state even if the long term plans
are unknown, and the short term appears to be negative. So long as things keep
changing, new and better things will be invented.

------
6ren
He's not really talking about current vs. next, but _what I made_ vs. _what
users want_ , which is probably the number one problem for makers.

------
tomlin
DHH is talking about ADD.

------
vacri
What's Next is a big problem for software because the simple stuff is easy and
noticeable, but the refinement is tricky and doesn't look like much.

At my old work, our basic software showed a series of line graphs crossing a
page in realtime. Compared to the previous available tech (paper pen printers)
it's Big and New.

Comes version 2 of the software and it has many refinements - antialiasing and
smoothing algorithms to make the data look nicer and more interpretable but
with no loss of significant detail; improved analytical algorithms with
tighter results; reduction in data stored per unit of information; so on and
so forth. But the users don't see this, and certainly don't think it's "much
more" than version 1 - "Shouldn't this be a patch? Why should we have to
purchase it again for v2?"

That job also taught me that what users want and what devs think users want
are frequently miles apart.

