You Are Not Late

https://medium.com/message/you-are-not-late-b3d76f963142

by applecore • 12 years ago

134 46 12 years ago

I remember having McDonalds.com in a shopping cart, ready to buy it. It was 1993 and I wasn't sure if it was worth $35 per year - I expected I would get sued.

I chickened out, and didn't buy any dot com domain names, and went back to my business at the time that had nothing to do with tech. I also chickened out from buying any other domain name until 1999.

So one of my life regrets is that I didn't buy a whole lot of domain names in 1993 when I first looked at them. A few millions in income missed.....

kordless• 12 years ago

You were afraid to do it. The sale of the domain later for a large amount of money resolved that fear inside you, only leaving the desire to have bought it. This is regret defined. While it serves a purpose in our lives in teaching a lesson, it makes very little logical sense to wish for a future scenario where you are less afraid, or more intent without considering the reasons why you were to begin with.

To avoid regret, realize and accept you are going to make mistakes. To avoid regret, face your fears when they are presented to you. The choice to do what scares you the most is the single most important ability you have in controlling your fate in this universe.

meowface3• 12 years ago

What would stop McDonalds from suing him if he refused to relinquish the domain name for free? Couldn't they claim it was trademark infringement?

Edit: Changed "copyright" to "trademark".

nemo1618• 12 years ago

thanks, I really needed this. I had similar feelings about computer hardware for years.

jonathanyc• 12 years ago

Good article. Reminds me of the proverb that says that although the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, th second best time is today. If only I could remember to keep that point-of-view more often...

VLM2• 12 years ago

"... saturated, bloated, overstuffed with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content ..."

The article has a nice positive message, but it needs to be tempered with experience that railroads didn't go on being formed and expand forever in the 1890s, nor did car companies around 1910. Starting Tesla might be a good idea, but don't forget Delorean and Yugo, and 80s home computers, and early 80s video games.

I'm not claiming the opposite negative view is correct (unlike the article's claim about that the positive view is correct). The negative view is worth considering. Also among readers who know about the above argument, some acknowledgement that the opposition exists might make the article more persuasive.

meowface3• 12 years ago

You make a good point, but I think it's clear that the Internet and HTTP will be here to stay for a long time. It's just a matter of creating something that adds real value.

VLM2• 12 years ago

Correct. Note: US centric dates: My point being that starting up a railroad in 1850 was a great idea, not so good by 1900.

Or there were about 150 startup automobile mfgrs around 1900, not quite so many by 1925.

Starting up a telephone company in 1900, good idea, in 1950, not so good idea.

We still have railroads and car mfgrs and telcos in 2014, they're just not realistic startup fields.

Every other field of recent human activity has gone thru the same stages of startup success, startup failures/consolidations, oligopoly oscillating with semi-regulated public utility, sometimes a long term decline in the industry after that.

Someday its economically inevitable that "Internet and HTTP" will not be the place to do startups. I don't think its today, but my grand kids are highly unlikely to be doing internet startups.

hemaljshah• 12 years ago

Great motivational read for budding or aspiring entrepreneurs. The one point I'd add to the article is to start viewing the world as a solver because we have more tools to fix and build better solutions than we did 30 years ago.

phreeza• 12 years ago

The funny thing about the Wired article they mention [0] is that it first ridicules McDonalds for being so tech-unsavy, and in the very next sentece suggests Burger King register a domain name containing an underscore...

[0] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.htm...

pllbnk• 12 years ago

If there actually existed domain names with underscores, probably many casual internet users wouldn't know how to type them.

evmar• 12 years ago

I think phreeza's point was that underscores aren't allowed in host names. (Officially, at least. I feel like I've seen them work and then sometimes seen them not work.)

snide• 12 years ago

I tell this to people all the time. Usually my analogy is that working on the web now is like working on Television in the 60s. It's still early and while the medium might be defined, the delivery and the product never is.

jqm• 12 years ago

When the author is wearing gloves with cut off fingers* and poking around in the rubble of the post apocalyptic civilization looking for an iron bar suitable for fending off packs of wild dogs, I hope he remembers writing this article.

Ok... that was a bit dark. But my point is... no one knows exactly what the future holds. I do expect he is somewhat correct and more advances are in store. But sometimes given the geopolitical and resource situation I become less confident of this as a certainty.

*Post apocalypse characters must wear gloves with cut off fingers. See Mad Max and The Matrix for specific style references if you wish to make your own in preparation.

zo1• 12 years ago

I, too, have fear of the future. Specifically in terms of the unstable world we live in. In some regards we're very lucky in that certain things are much more difficult for the world to let happen, mostly due to the speed at which news (and outrage) travels.

But, at the same time, I'm forced to admit that if it comes down to it, we really are very much powerless. This is specifically why I'm an anarcho-capitalist, as I believe that the state is the single most dangerous entity we can conceive of; and we've gone ahead and given it near-absolute control over our lives with what lately seems to be very little oversight.

As an aside, the article is indeed quite motivating. No time like the present, I say.

grimtrigger• 12 years ago

I take issue with the comparison. The barriers to the internet were many times lower than the current round of innovations (3d printing, virtual reality). The only thing that comes close is bitcoin and the relative cheapness lasted only a few years.

dangoor• 12 years ago

The barriers were still high back then, but they were different barriers. Bandwidth, CPU and storage all cost a lot more than they do now, and the tools available were less sophisticated. Building an online store or CMS back then was a much bigger piece of work.

Today, you don't need to focus on those kinds of problems, generally. The problems are the next level up.

rdl2• 12 years ago

How we access the internet has changed (mobile, smartphones, pervasive broadband), and businesses effectively provide great services connected to the Internet (Amazon in particular), but for me, the only real changes other than those from ~1992 to today are mixed:

1) Lots more people on the Internet

2) Lower barrier to access

Sure, it's prettier, but USENET, IRC, etc. basically covered what we do with the Internet today. USENET was still technically superior to most discussion tools today; the web was a big step backward overall until the mid/late 200Xs, vs. native clients.

spindritf2• 12 years ago

USENET was still technically superior to most discussion tools today

I'd go even further and say it's still superior to all of them. So is IRC.

ghshephard2• 12 years ago

Not sure what newsgroups you use these days, but every one I ever made use of has turned into a cesspool of spam and low value content. Usenet has been dead for at least 5+ years for me - there was a 4 year period where my fingers had memorized every shortcut available to nn...

ghshephard2• 12 years ago

Couldn't disagree with you more. To name just a dozen new internet things from the last 10 years that I did not have in 1990s.

  o Google
  o Wikipedia
  o Netflix
  o iTunes
  o Spotify/Pandora
  o Stack Exchange/Overflow
  o RSS (Google Reader/Feedly/etc..)
  o GitHub
  o Facebook
  o Instagram
  o Whatsapp
  o Gmail
  o Google Earth/Maps.

I can only imagine what the next dozen new categories will be invented in the next 15 years.

rdl2• 12 years ago

Handling video and audio was an improvement brought mostly by computing technology vs. the Internet expanding; I'm fine with a LAN-local archive of music and video (admittedly, using flac/mp3 and bd remux and h264), and a lot of my content was ripped from physical media vs. downloaded. So the streaming services aren't terribly compelling to me.

(Pictures, too -- until the late 1990s, graphics were a pain)

USENET > RSS.

CVS for projects like FreeBSD wasn't particularly worse than GitHub.

gmail is actually inferior to mutt + own mail server in a lot of ways; it's easier to set up.

Google Earth/Maps are awesome, as is google search. Wikipedia is the kind of thing which easily could have existed in the 1990s-style Internet; FAQs were largely the same thing, just structured differently. I'd count it, but I do think a 1990-era Internet would have eventually created some kind of repository of indexed knowledge like Wikipedia.

cliveowen• 12 years ago

I can only imagine what the next dozen new categories will be invented in the next 15 years.

I don't think 15 years will make that much difference, the economics have changed and have been turned on the head. Today we have this handful of mega corporations with billions of cash in their coffers that are responsible for much of the services used by most of the world everyday and they also reap most of the revenue. Every new entrant even remotely successful it's either squashed or bought out, so I don't think there's there's the potential for a new company to reach the same heights. In fact, I think the market will be exactly the same, if there will be a bunch of new big companies out there, they will likely be started by the same entrepreneurs responsible for today's major ventures, they are the ones with the loads of cash, remember.

FLUX-YOU• 12 years ago

You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”

It's a bit easy to imagine once something's already survived it. A device with a hundred sensors probably survived hundreds or thousands of failed released or unreleased iterations. Every other mature field has probably gone through this same sentiment (and maybe still going through it, and perhaps will always go through it). If only astronomers today could imagine what new, novel techniques are just lying right in front of them with all of this computing power and automated manufacturing ability. Imagine how much further ahead astronomers would be in 2044 if they had discovered thingamajig back in 2014 instead of 2040! I think the greybeards of 2044 would be a bit biased.

But this feels like we'd be backpedaling on choosing the right tool for the right job. Slapping AI onto something and watching it fail is great for our knowledge, but not our wallets. This is when business leaders create friction with development. This is where you get "Just make it work" commands which gets the snowball of technical debt rolling. The value gained is "This solution sucked in reality! Or maybe we just sucked delivering it! Don't do what we did unless you have a good reason!", but that's not what we're really after, is it? We could sit around and brute force a bunch of combinations of ideas and markets, I guess.

And finally, if it was true back in 1985 with domain names, and it's true today with AI and the cloud, why wouldn't it be true for 2044 with VR contact lenses and holodecks? It seems like the future will be like then and now in this regard. So.. there will always be a wide open frontier somewhere? Do we really say anything substantial by saying "Today's an open frontier for internet ideas!"

I think there's a lot less low-hanging fruit than this article might have us believe.

bittercynic• 12 years ago

The amount of low-hanging fruit available is at least partially dependent on how tall you are.

linker3000• 12 years ago

...and the number of patents/patent trolls waiting in the wings.

unoti• 12 years ago

There most definitely is low hanging fruit. If you had the benefit of perfect hindsight from 20 or 30 years in the future, almost certainly there are things you could create today and be wildly successful with.

However, none of us have the benefit of perfect hindsight from the future. We have to actually figure out what to do for ourselves, the hard way. And once your development skills get to a certain point, figuring out what to do is much harder than figuring out how to do it, generally.

And so that makes that low hanging fruit not all that easy to get to after all, which is your point I guess! But still, the article gives a useful angle to think of these things from, I think.

unchocked• 12 years ago

I think his point is that, as the technological sphere expands, there is continually more opportunity than there ever has been before. In that light, your best point seems to be that most of us looking to capitalize on that opportunity will fail, as have most innovators before.

DodgyEggplant• 12 years ago

You are not too old either

badman_ting• 12 years ago

Probably correct. But, it doesn't feel that way.

r_singh• 12 years ago

Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier!

Maybe the rest of the article is making it sound simpler than it is. But I couldn't agree with the above lines more.

woodchuck64• 12 years ago

Had to find out what eventually happened with Quittner/McDonalds.com:

"Quittner did indeed offer the name back to McDonald's in one of his magazine columns, but not in exchange for money. In a manner reminiscent of the Princeton Review, he instead offered to surrender the domain name if McDonald's corporation would underwrite some Internet equipment for a grade school. This and other provoking articles caught the corporation's attention; they responded not by funding grade school computer access, but by pressuring the InterNIC to revoke Quittner's registration of the name. Although the registry had stayed out of previous disputes such as the Adam Curry litigation, sticking tenaciously to its "first-come, first-served" policy, it wavered before this new corporate threat. InterNIC first resisted McDonalds' demands, then eventually agreed to revoke the registration, then changed its mind again, leaving the registration with Quittner. McDonald's ultimately agreed to donate $3,500 to purchase the equipment."

From http://jolt.richmond.edu/v1i1/burk.html

narag2• 12 years ago

Would that nasty move be acceptable today for McDonalds? The Internet has changed some things.

dkuntz2• 12 years ago

Yes? That's basically what large corporations do today...

Nissan (the car company) is still working to get nissan.com, and they're almost exclusively attempting to do it through legal means instead of negotiating with the current owner.

spoolphiz• 12 years ago

The argument made here is flawed. There is still plenty of "low hanging fruit" today but the cost/barrier of entry is significantly higher than it was in the early days.

"People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the internet"

Seems to me like even if developing a holodeck is looked at as an iterative process comprised of many small innovations it's still a lot more daunting and less feasible for a small team to do than building an online book store in the 90s.

With that said the internet is obviously in its infancy and the opportunities now are indeed boundless.

Superbloop• 12 years ago

I love this article.

But honestly, I think we make an important and incorrect assumption- we try to revolutionise by evolution.

Why put smartphones on your wrist or your head and call it a revolution? Why make an app that is a Tinder or a Wikipedia or a Google for something else and call it a revolution?

The real revolutions are going to be things that havent been thought of yet, in any manner. In the meanwhile, we have this hyper-accelerated evolution- lets focus on lowering the barriers for entry...

jehna1• 12 years ago

There is no such thing as "the low-hanging fruit".

The year is 1982. Rodney Mullen just managed to perform the world's first "Ollie" skateboarding trick, that can be count as somewhat the start of the modern day street skateboarding.

What now is the most junior skateboarding trick (with available equipment, training etc.) was not a low-hanging fruit back then. While looking back, you can easily learn the trick by imitating; but back then there was no-one to learn it from. You had to go trial-and-error a sh*tload of times before making the first trick.

Of course it looks sooo low-hanging fruit now. With current equipment and support. But you have to realise that the tools and methods came afterwards, to support the original invention. But looking the time back then, you had none of the aids. Just you, climbing to that tall tree to grab the apple and plant the seeds so everyone else could grab the fruits from smaller trees.

You Are Not Late

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