What Happened in 2014?

http://avc.com/2014/12/what-just-happened/

by ninago • 12 years ago

111 39 12 years ago

I've always admired Fred's way of laying things out without any nonsense and seemingly quite transparently. I'm very keen to found out what he thinks 2015 will bring tomorrow (and anyone else in the know, really..)

rubiquity2• 12 years ago

Hopefully 2015 will be the year of capitalizing the first letter of the first word in a new sentence.

bootload2• 12 years ago

"... capitalizing the first letter of the first word in a new sentence. ..."

Faster to type, easy to run a bit of code to achieve.

fredwilson3• 12 years ago

ha! that's great. i don't think i'm going to do that though.

jobu2• 12 years ago

"7/ youtube became a monster. it always has been. but in 2014 youtube emerged as the place for entertainment consumption for anyone under 16"

This seems so huge to me - maybe it's because I have kids and saw it happen firsthand over the course of this year.

cms07• 12 years ago

Can you elaborate some on this?

jobu2• 12 years ago

Not sure exactly how it happened. It started out as watching Minecraft videos and morphed into other game reviewers. Lately it's been everything from fashion shows to scripted shows like Video Game High School (https://www.youtube.com/show/videogamehighschoolvghs)

A couple years ago we dropped cable TV because everyone was watching Netflix, now I'm thinking about dropping Netflix because the kids all watch Youtube (and I don't need to be wasting time on Netflix).

gbog• 12 years ago

Well, I guess I should thank the great firewall then, for my kids hardly ever watch YouTube, or tv.

seanmcdirmid2• 12 years ago

Youku and tudou are virtually a mirror of youtube. Not to mention new entrants like bilibili. I would say the Chinese video scene is much more wild and crazy than outside of China.

cvander• 12 years ago

Facebook is doing video very good and very quiet. We're getting more views on a native videpost in facebook with less likes than from youtube with more subscribers. Part of this is because of the auto-play in the newsfeed.

marincounty• 12 years ago

I still have videos on Youtube I can't get off. This was after Google bought Youtube, and couldn't leave their medling hands(if it works--leave it alone?) off a good site. Yea, I changed accounts. Yea, I tried to do what others, and Youtube suggested, but there was an error somewhere; and I have Youtube videos I can't get to unless I comment on my video--which I disabled originally. One video got enough hits that Google put up advertising on it? I emailed Google and the person emailed me back, "Check the Tips on the Youtube help board?"

detaro• 12 years ago

If the account isn't clearly linked to you and you own to content, send them a DCMA takedown notice?

noobermin• 12 years ago

I'm 24, so I'm not much of a youngster, but I've used youtube as my sole media entertainment site since 2008.

UweSchmidt• 12 years ago

"8/ we finally got rid of files. dropbox, google drive, soundcloud, spotify, netflix, hbogo, youtube, wattpad, kindle, and a host of other cloud based services finally killed off three letter filenames"

This is amazing and I guess I'll need to meditate over this fact (as I still like those files on my computer, feels as if I own them).

For now I'd still recommend holding on to your important stuff and considering the nature of the relationship between you and your cloud provider.

marcusgarvey• 12 years ago

This completely ignores the impact of the Snowden revelations which might curtail this trend.

DanBC• 12 years ago

The overwhelming majority of people have made no changes after Snowden.

Even on HN most people have only made a few changes. Only a tiny number of HN users have PGP / GPG keys available, for one example.

jordanpg• 12 years ago

It's interesting to consider this observation in the context of young people who will grow up largely without the abstraction of local file storage at all. Anyone over 30 or so still feels slightly nervous or protective of their files, but that's only because we've internalized the analogy between stored data and physical stuff.

I suspect the abstraction of a local filesystem will become more and more quaint and give way to popular abstraction involving a remote, distributed filesystem of some sort.

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

We haven't gotten rid of files, we've just obfuscated their existence. Akin to putting a splash screen, or allegorically sticking our heads in the sand.

If we had actually devised an alternative to hierarchical file systems and moved to something like a persistent object store (as with Newton OS, PalmOS and some other platforms), that would have been impressive, though in the long term might not turn out well due to relative novelty and lack of battle testing to the idea.

In fact, trying to pretend files don't exist in an environment dominated by them is foolish.

seanmcdirmid2• 12 years ago

The goal isn't to get rid of files so much as filing cabinets and folders. I think we are still a long way from that.

mjklin• 12 years ago

Especially in light of what Bitcasa pulled this year...

forrestthewoods• 12 years ago

Don't dropbox and google drive simply mirror files in the cloud? The other things eliminate files but I'm not sure what those two contribute to the file genocide.

jschwartzi• 12 years ago

They only do this to the extent that your local mirror is a physical copy of the latest version of the datastore in the cloud. So if someone deletes something in the cloud, it is removed from your local datastore. Additionally, if someone deletes something in their local copy, that local copy is mirrored to the cloud, which subsequently deletes that data from your local copy.

They are not mirroring your data, you are mirroring their data.

jasonkostempski• 12 years ago

I feel like this trend will reverse itself when the current generation becomes nostalgic and realize they have nothing to pass on to their children.

chime• 12 years ago

Maybe passing on files to children is not something most people will even have to worry about because social media stores everything forever. Once we've shared our life's worth of holiday photos with our kids on Facebook or G+, they'll still be able to access them after we're gone.

Maybe the things we want to pass on to our kids will be more tactile. Our first iPhone or 3d-printed wrench? Or maybe the same type of heirlooms that have been passed down families for generations - jewelry, watches, paintings. Sure we won't be giving handwritten letters to our progeny but frankly, that's our own fault. I haven't even written a single letter to my wife! And I don't want our banal "where u at" text messages to be memorialized for posterity. Our vacation photos or public blog entries shared online will do just fine.

X-combinator• 12 years ago

Totally agree, And having your own cloud is another practical choice.

fiatjaf• 12 years ago

And that is awful, right? We got rid of files by the same way we could get rid of files 20 years ago: by not having them anymore, burning them, storing our information in other people's files.

tim333• 12 years ago

I just clicked my Dropbox icon and what pops up is a list of files with extensions like .pdf, .txt. They don't seem terribly killed off. Wilson's observation seems to be more that people don't bother storing a lot of stuff like mp3s on their phones which is fair enough it you can stream your music adequately.

sysk• 12 years ago

I love hating on VCs as much as the other guy, but I must admit I'm envious of the ability of Fred Wilson (and VCs in general) to zoom out and see the bigger picture. I wonder if that's a skill that can be learned/taught.

fredwilson3• 12 years ago

yes, absolutely. when you do something every day for 25 years, you get good at. i could not do it one bit when i started out. it's a learned skill not something you are born with

vinceguidry• 12 years ago

A VC in particular has to optimize for this kind of thinking in order to get a better signal-to-noise ratio on his investments.

Think about how it's different from other kinds of investing. Warren Buffett looks for industries that are stable and picks good companies that operate in those industries. To do this well you need to know what makes an industry stable and what makes a company good. Examine enough of them, avoid trying to get rich quickly, build a system, and you can do well at it.

VC by definition operates in unstable industries and has to pick winners based both on having a good read of people so as to pick good founders, and having a good read of society so as to have an idea of which kind of ventures might succeed.

To do well investing you need to have a good deal of money, to earn this money you generally have to be successful, the act of creating that success later plays a role in helping you to understand what makes a good investment.

So, you start out, conquer an industry and make a bunch of money, then use that success to make even more money investing in other people. If you can do both of these things, then you can not put your foot in your mouth every third word when trying to predict the future. Maybe you can cut it down to every third paragraph.

zhte415• 12 years ago

It is a skill, and is often trained or realised by people in a leadership position: stop doing, start reflecting. Spend your working time reflecting about what's going around you (and the hope is, answers will flow). That doesn't mean meditating in your office, but making the time and having the freedom to think (and, sometimes, experiment, sometimes wildly).

This is harder to so in some environments, but often, the more one goes up a ladder of influence, the easier it becomes (self efficiency, delegation, understanding of employer or sponsor).

I have no idea regarding VCs, but in large companies a common formula is: Managers: 10% of time for reflection Managers of managers: 20-30% of time Managers of managers of managers and further through the tree: 60% of time

This power of reflection increases clarity in decision, communication, and impact, whatever the field. Contrast this with the need to constantly fight fires with no time to think about the big picture.

Often, it doesn't work out this way. Lack of delegation, filling more than one role at the same time ('stretch goals' that really mean the organisation is under resourced), desire for immediate impact stop this from working.

crimsonalucard2• 12 years ago

Big picture thinking is not a skill. If you study any field of knowledge or industry you automatically get a big picture idea of what's going on. If you read a book you automatically get a big picture idea of the book. Anybody can do it, it's not talent, and it's not even learned, it's a basic human trait.

The only thing you can say about the author is that he's knowledgeable about the industry. His speculations on what happened in 2014 is a reflection of his knowledge, not skill.

Coding is a skill. If you just read a book on C++ without writing a line of code you gain a big picture understanding of C++, yet you lack the necessary skill to actually code. Like big picture thinking, anybody can learn a skill, but It takes far more time and discipline to actually gain a true skill then it does to see the big picture.

I'll say one thing though, understanding the big picture is often all you need to bullshit other people into thinking you have a certain skill.

crimsonalucard2• 12 years ago

People will only know what really happened in 2014 when it's 2017. It's too soon to say whether something is just a fad or an actual paradigm shifting trend.

fredwilson3• 12 years ago

correct

What Happened in 2014?

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