Cute. Whenever someone wants to defend their dear little niche/dead end product they always make that reference on HN. Similarly on slashdot with the ipod comment. Yet there is a subtlety that every person who makes this broken analogy are missing (apart from the fact, that, well, if someone made a book that kept a record of all instances this analogy was made on HN, it would be hard to miss the fact that.. no, X pet product defended Y times on hn didn't become the next dropbox)
The criticisms against dropbox and the first ipod were nerds who thought there was already, -within the same product category- good enough things, underestimating the importance of things like UI, accessibility, portability (in the case of the ipod when people compared it to the gigantic creative jukeboxes and mp3 CD-R players).
They were criticism targeted at a single product, not an entire category, because no one sane would think there's no use for tools that remotely sync documents, or gives you the ability to listen to your entire music collection on the go. Dropbox and the ipod were great, refined products, but products that stood on the shoulders of giants and markets that were already plentiful by the time they came out. Keeping backups of documents is a need a great amount of people have. People were already listening to portable music when the ipod came out. They were product that did important things better than anyone else on the market, but products that entered markets that were already quite mature. Meanwhile VR as a whole is still a niche.
VR enthusiasts are more like the nerds of old who made fun of dropbox. They have very little understanding of the wants of the general public. Shut yourself in a closed uncanny valley virtual world wearing an uncomfortable headset for hours? This is more like the people who thought rolling your own was better than dropbox.
Zuckerberg is not the next Steve Jobs. If anything, he's the carbon copy of the typical slashdot reader. His mindset is thoroughly alien to the human mind.
>In the Recode interview, Zuckerberg falls back on the term “use case” to describe people using Facebook Live to stream their own suicides in real time. He repeats this characterization, going on to call suicide-streaming a “use” of Facebook Live: “There were a small number of uses of this, but people were using it to…show themselves self-harm or there were even a few cases of suicide.”
This is the sort of people who think the future of humanity is to enclose yourself harder in your little virtual bubble. The everyday man finds this sort repellent.
I love it when people call VR niche. The quest 2 is estimates to have sold a similar number of units to the Xbox X and S combined, and about 3/4 the number of units as the PS5 [1]. It is now a mainstream console.
a mainstream console is used everyday. how many VR headsets are sitting unused on shelves? the volume of sales is far from being the most relevant metric.
>This type of thinking is what hurt Kodak ultimately I think. They invented the first digital camera, then scrapped it because they made money in film.
There is nowhere near as much money to be made in the digital camera market. They failed to adapt, but at the same time, there was no saving what was an immensely large company even if they did adapt.
Film revenue for Kodak was $16 billions in 1996, adjusted for inflation that would be $30 billions, that number will make anything digital look like nothing (15 billions is the current revenue for the entirety of the digital sensor market in current dollars and Sony has 43% of that pie, a share that has been dropping as more competitors have entered the market and as Samsung kept improving.). You see a Sony sensor in many phones, but Sony doesn't make anywhere near film-era Kodak revenue on that side of their business. The higher end camera business is more profitable, but it doesn't sell much in volume, and the low end of the camera business has almost disappeared because of smartphones. (Canon, the biggest producer of digital cameras, has all but ceased making compact cameras apart from their G7X model. You can still find other models on the market but they're older unsold stock and refurbs. They also announced they would stop producing new DSLRs and will solely focus on making a narrow range of mirrorless cameras. To put it bluntly, the digital camera market is in a very unhealthy state. Don't solely look at price tags either, Leica for example makes some of the most expensive cameras on the market but.. their revenue is $400 millions, not even $1B)
This is all correct, but kinda shifting timelines.
For example, if Kodak had been first to digital, that doesn't mean they'd have had to give up any film at all. And since they were first, they could have set margins where they liked. Whether it would have survived and thrived...who knows. As others have pointed out, computers weren't commonplace back then.
Digital cameras did get commoditized, nearly 30 years after Kodak had invented it. So obviously, by today they'd had to have move on. High end sensors, glass, heck even cloud computing, something akin to Google Photos... there's no telling where they could have been if they'd have leaned in early.
That said, you point out the sensor market is 15 billion today... and Sony has about half. This is way, way more money than Kodak makes anymore. Today Kodak is at about a billion revenue per year.
In this context, it's sort of interesting to compare Google's approach of trying a million ideas, then killing the ones that don't take off or don't make money. Maybe that's how you stay ahead of the game and don't become a Kodak, which failed to sustain an experimental new business for long enough. Google takes quite a lot of shit for this approach (understandably).
But are any of Google's side projects an existential threat to their main business of search / ads in the way that digital cameras were to film for Kodak?
>I suspect it would be a lot more popular if people didn't risk getting dragged into a courtroom for doing it.
Well, talking about the popularity of doing remixes..
A game developer and artist in japan allowed a free-for-all on his IPs, basically people can do whatever they want to do whether it's remix his games soundtracks, make games inspired by his or write stories about his games and the amount of content generated is just staggering. Over 100 000 songs have been released in physical CD format in official Japanese conventions, and many more not counted in other countries or in digital-only forms. In the case of music, there's covers/remixes/more creative interpretations done in pretty much any genre imaginable. Here's some I've enjoyed:
>Remixing has the ability to take bad art and make it better
Although I wouldn't call the original touhou soundtracks 'bad art', they are flawed creations: Zun is good at creating catchy melodies and overall composition, but the quality of the instrumentation is poor (mostly Roland SC-88 and Edirol SD90 presets, not the most musical of sample based synthesizers IMHO. Of the early sample technology, the mt-32 and D50 are more interesting than the sound canvas series) and the fans have taken something that had potential and turned it into things that are worth listening to standalone.
Cute. Whenever someone wants to defend their dear little niche/dead end product they always make that reference on HN. Similarly on slashdot with the ipod comment. Yet there is a subtlety that every person who makes this broken analogy are missing (apart from the fact, that, well, if someone made a book that kept a record of all instances this analogy was made on HN, it would be hard to miss the fact that.. no, X pet product defended Y times on hn didn't become the next dropbox)
The criticisms against dropbox and the first ipod were nerds who thought there was already, -within the same product category- good enough things, underestimating the importance of things like UI, accessibility, portability (in the case of the ipod when people compared it to the gigantic creative jukeboxes and mp3 CD-R players).
They were criticism targeted at a single product, not an entire category, because no one sane would think there's no use for tools that remotely sync documents, or gives you the ability to listen to your entire music collection on the go. Dropbox and the ipod were great, refined products, but products that stood on the shoulders of giants and markets that were already plentiful by the time they came out. Keeping backups of documents is a need a great amount of people have. People were already listening to portable music when the ipod came out. They were product that did important things better than anyone else on the market, but products that entered markets that were already quite mature. Meanwhile VR as a whole is still a niche.
VR enthusiasts are more like the nerds of old who made fun of dropbox. They have very little understanding of the wants of the general public. Shut yourself in a closed uncanny valley virtual world wearing an uncomfortable headset for hours? This is more like the people who thought rolling your own was better than dropbox.
Zuckerberg is not the next Steve Jobs. If anything, he's the carbon copy of the typical slashdot reader. His mindset is thoroughly alien to the human mind.
https://qz.com/1331956/mark-zuckerberg-keeps-forgetting-abou...
>In the Recode interview, Zuckerberg falls back on the term “use case” to describe people using Facebook Live to stream their own suicides in real time. He repeats this characterization, going on to call suicide-streaming a “use” of Facebook Live: “There were a small number of uses of this, but people were using it to…show themselves self-harm or there were even a few cases of suicide.”
This is the sort of people who think the future of humanity is to enclose yourself harder in your little virtual bubble. The everyday man finds this sort repellent.