In the valley of the half-invented
On the occasion of the death of AltaVista, Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) writes:
In 1973, Xerox had the Alto and failed to capitalize on it. In 1995, DEC had AltaVista. What leads are big tech companies squandering today?
It’s a great question, but I think phrasing it as “squandering” is unfair both to the earlier leader (which is doing what it can) and to the later leader (which takes the lead with great industry and creativity).
In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb calls uncommercialized inventions “half-invented” — “and taking the half-invented into the invented is often the real breakthrough.” (For instance, there’s evidence that Mesoamericans had wheels as toys, but never made the leap to practical applications.) What can we currently see as half-invented?
Kinect. While it’s been commercially successful, it’s still a plaything. What would a world-changing Kinect look like? Sell standalones that lie in a corner to bring the room alive, make it “smart,” speaking openly to any device nearby. Any app could know who’s there and what they’re doing. Pointing is a fundamental animal signal, but tech users still can’t point at anything offscreen. A matured Kinect could let the pointer jump off the screen and into physical space. Hello John Anderton.
Photosynth. Though photo apps are big, the potential of letting the world’s lenses mutually contextualize each other remains largely untapped. There’s not yet any synergy in a dozen (or a hundred thousand) people uploading photos of the same event. Photosynth (and Color) had that dream.
WolframAlpha. Like AltaVista was a showcase for DEC’s hardware, it sometimes seems Wolfram Research still sees WolframAlpha as a showcase to sell Mathematica. It’s hampered by Mathematica plug-ins, results returned as inflexible GIFs, and the difficulty of adding structured data and algorithms. Where would Google be if sites had to be added to its index by hand? But Wolfram needs more than just a crawler.
Facebook Gifts. It’s a pleasure to send something with Facebook Gifts; there’s a fun unwrapping, a good mix of public sharing and private intimacy, and seamless addressing. It’s a glimpse of 21st-century social shipping’s potential. Except people aren’t interested in shipping each other much. (Would same-day change anything? Drones??)
Klout. Where Microsoft Passport failed, a new generation of identity providers has succeeded. But I still don’t know how to trust the names I see around the Internet, nor the things they say. As disgusting as Klout is, the idea will have its day. Klout and LinkedIn endorsements are laying the groundwork for domain-sensitive PeopleRank.
Tweet embedding. Along similar lines of trust in people and their statements, something like tweet embedding (but inline and without the 140-character limit) could bring attributable verifiable quotations to the web, reinventing citation. So much of writing is a mashup of existing writing, but it’s not yet machine-readable.
Push, notifications. Email remains the lowest-common-denominator home for notifications, but it wasn’t built for it and doesn’t do it well (though Gmail and Mailbox try to save it). We have major notification platforms on Android, iOS, OS X, Facebook, and Chrome; I don’t know if the future is more or less fragmented. Meanwhile, Google Now is approaching the voice-in-your-ear, second-conscience vision of personal AI. In the 1997 Wired cover story “PUSH!”, Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf wrote that we didn’t yet “surf” the Web, only hopscotch or spelunk; “Only when waves of media begin to cascade behind our screens—huge swells of unbrowsable stuff—will we truly surf.”
Plus smartwatches, Google Glass, GPS, Fitbit, 3D printing, and so on. Maybe capitalism, maybe democracy! But then, what isn’t half-invented? As I re-read, I may be getting off topic; can push and notifications really be called half-invented? They’re so huge already. But AltaVista once looked huge. What could possibly be fully-invented, saturated, done? Pyramids. Frescoes. The space shuttle. God forbid.
Purveyors of the half-invented are doing the best they can, and often doing brilliant work. When they lose, as all things inevitably lose, it will not be because they squandered anything; it will be because their job is hard. I just cite these examples because they seem to have potential far beyond their current implementations, to be achieved once as-yet-unknown hurdles are surpassed with brilliant as-yet-unknown solutions.
There are just more ways for them to eventually fail than to keep winning. But a lucky few of them may themselves be the ones to take it to the next level.
In its reign as the Leviathan, Microsoft explored a broad span of products and services that would later be popularized by others, including smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, delegated identity, Dropbox, and so on. Initiatives like HailStorm, Palladium, and WinFS were more early than wrong. Like Sun and others, MSN at the twilight of the 20th century wanted to build what we’d now call a “cloud OS”, integrating network content and services directly into Windows Explorer. Microsoft can only remain dominant as long as it continues commercializing what it half-invents.
Bell, Xerox, IBM once had that phase. Google is in it now. Perhaps it is the nature of every successive monopoly that the seeds of the next age of innovation germinate in their well-funded research labs. It looks like a powerful positive externality of monopoly: when the ones extracting economic profit via market power are dedicated to a vision of the future, however foggy, they serve to counteract the basic human failure of systematic underinvestment in the discounted world of tomorrow.
As we seek to build the next world, not all of our foundation is built on bedrock; parts are constantly sinking into the muck. Only a fraction of Newton’s genius was ever legibly committed to paper. He, mortal, died; we cannot stand on his shoulders. What we can stand on is just what he left behind.
These towering giants see and stretch toward a more distant horizon. It is the same story that parents and children have acted out over a thousand generations. Listen to their wisdom and antiwisdom as they fade into senescence. Pick the carcass clean. Strive that each wave might crest higher than the last.
