Ask Slashdot: Is the Pace of Tech Innovation Spontaneous Or Planned? 175
dryriver writes:
People who are only mildly tech- or engineering-literate tend to think that innovation is really difficult and expensive, takes years to achieve/discover, and that when something "amazing" is actually discovered, the innovative tech is integrated into products like smartphones or PCs "as soon as is technically possible".
More tech and engineering literate people I talk to frequently tell me the exact opposite of this, namely that companies often discover an innovative method or technique in their R&D labs, are capable of packaging said method or technique into a product as soon as the next fiscal year, but choose instead to sit on the innovation for several years, bringing it to market only when competitors force them to, or sales of existing-paradigm products start to become lacklustre...at the exact point in time where the sales and profit numbers from selling the innovation are maximized.
One tech market, two very different opinions on how it actually works. So here's the question. Do we typically get innovation in products "shortly after the necessary techniques are discovered and mastered", or do we rather get cool innovation handed to us "in a planned fashion" -- at a deliberately delayed future date when the manufacturer thinks it will achieve the greatest finanical return from selling the innovation to the end user?
More tech and engineering literate people I talk to frequently tell me the exact opposite of this, namely that companies often discover an innovative method or technique in their R&D labs, are capable of packaging said method or technique into a product as soon as the next fiscal year, but choose instead to sit on the innovation for several years, bringing it to market only when competitors force them to, or sales of existing-paradigm products start to become lacklustre...at the exact point in time where the sales and profit numbers from selling the innovation are maximized.
One tech market, two very different opinions on how it actually works. So here's the question. Do we typically get innovation in products "shortly after the necessary techniques are discovered and mastered", or do we rather get cool innovation handed to us "in a planned fashion" -- at a deliberately delayed future date when the manufacturer thinks it will achieve the greatest finanical return from selling the innovation to the end user?
Often had this impression with Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Apple is innovating? News to me. (Sorry, could not resist. In essence, I agree with you.)
Re: (Score:1)
Apple's flavor of innovation mostly consists of buying decades of hard work and real innovation done by other companies. Siri. Apple A-series CPUs and GPUs. What's the most recent thing, Intel modems wasn't it? Just to name a few.
Re: (Score:3)
Apple's innovation is not in the technology. It's in the refinement of the technology and making it available for the masses.
Nothing Apple introduces is new or novel - it's existed in some form or another. However, in general (though they've had some spectacular fails) when Apple introduces it, it's much more refined and works in a much smoother fashion than what people have seen or used in the past.
It feels like at tim
Re: Often had this impression with Apple (Score:2)
Don't forget the removal of tech features that are useful in some situations like the 3.5mm jack, IR port and user-replaceable batteries.
That is planned obsolence.
Re: (Score:1)
"Useful... IR port"
ZAP! BANG! KA-POW! *vigorous burning*
Dammit, I've got to remember to unplug those things before I open a web browser, that's the 4th irony meter that's exploded in a month.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it would have been a great feature for some uses, like an app to be used as a remote control for your entertainment system.
Now you need to create some bridge using bluetooth to IR.
Re: (Score:2)
He's clearly talking about things in general, you drooling aspie shitcock.
Re: (Score:2)
Apple never had an "IR port" or user replaceable batteries in their phones
You are technically correct, as the Newton PDAs were not phones. I think a claim closer to Z00L00K's point is that Apple removed replaceable batteries and infrared communication in the transition from Newton to iPhone.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
He's talking about Apple laptops of course. Maybe it's the state of Apple these days that no one remembers that they make stuff other than phones?
Re:Often had this impression with Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
The US car companies used to take up to 15 years to develop new cars, then the Japanese jumped into the US market with fast design changes and have taken a huge market share as a result
The US telecom giant AT&T had planned to roll out "shotgun ISDN" by 2005 (to preserve their high dollar T1 market), and was (were, since AT&T breakup) exposed to DSL and cable companies that have taken a huge share of the last mile market
Sun tried to push their expensive Solaris machines (ignoring their own x86-64 servers), while the rest of the planet when to Linux/x86-64...
It goes on and on and on. This is is because business schools teach students to wring every last possible dime out of an investment while AVOIDING additional costs, like developing new products
This left the door open for companies like Apple, which was almost destroyed when "real businessmen" took over and failed to develop new products
Steve Jobs had to go form his own company to develop the NeXT computer, whose OS eventually became Apple OSX
So, to answer the original question
Lots of established companies attempt to plan innovation, and they will always be exposed to faster companies that are able to get funding and jump into the market with better products.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
"next's os didn't become osx, they pinched a bunch of ideas out of it and slapped them on BSD"
That's totally, completely, and even technically false. NeXTStep was always BSD based.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget, NeXT was a flop, mostly because of Job's philosophy of focusing more on design than on making it do a useful job for the market. The fact that a lot of the software framework was recycled into later Macs was more due to the resourceful engineers than to any brilliance from Jobs. To be fair, the workstation market was saturated when the NeXT debuted (it was sophisticated compared to a home computer market, but underwhelming in the workstation market). Jobs focused on the hardware and it was
Re: (Score:2)
The Newton was truly innovative, the iPhone while nicely packaged (and artificially limited) wasn't.
Re: (Score:3)
I think Apple would like to destroy the competition, particularly in the PC space. At which point this conspiracy theory is actually not only possible, but probable. But they're not there yet. So I think your fears are misplaced.
I do know for a fact that telecomms have the means and technology far beyond what they deliver to you, but will not deliver. What AT&T is delivering no in place of fiber was invented in the early 90s, for example. I have worked for the people who invented it, and worked on their
Re: (Score:2)
Apple's marketing strategy is fundamentally incompatible with taking over the market. Charging more for shiny doesn't cover the bulk of the market, which is why Apple has never had more than 11% of the PC market, or about 12% of the smartphone market (except perhaps the first couple years where they had little competition.) You can't sell Apple devices without a more successful competing product to talk shit about.
Re:Often had this impression with Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple hasn't been innovating for years. What they do claim as innovations are really just gimmicks, e.g. face unlock with their thousands of IR points projected on your face works little better than their rival's systems and came at the expense of the fingerprint scanner.
It's got to the point where removing features like the headphone jack and USB ports is what they tout as innovation.
To some extent Apple has always been that way. Jobs was good at hyping features up, and glossing over flaws or areas where Apple was behind like 3G adoption or mapping.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Products that were innovated outside of Apple much of the time. Apple didn't create the music player or the smart phone, but it certainly knew how to buy such companies, improve on them, and market them. After all, the music player is a simple idea and there were lots of mp3 players at the time, and a smart phone was just a phone with a PDA attached, and the genius was marketing to the consumers (with deep pockets ) rather than to business like many of the feature phone and PDA makers at the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Yes and no. Apple did try like crazy to get fingerprint sensing to work from behind the screen - they were trying to rid the phone of its dedicated home butting, an reasonable thing to do. Face recognition was a compromise when fingerprint reading didn't work. (Anyone see Blade Runner 2049?)
So what is "innovation"? There are degrees.. Face recognition? Fingerprint recognition? Does using 3 cameras instead of developing a workable zoom lens in a collapsed space count? How innovative is artificial backgro
Re: (Score:2)
To be honest here, I a not sure what "Tech Innovation" is. I haven't seen much new of significance in a decade. What does come out that seems like a new feature is just consumer oriented fluff. If something does seem new and different it's usually just an old idea repackaged. Quantum computing is interesting, but it's not commercial so it gets little traction compared to the latest social media startup. Apple is making things thinner, but is there really innovation or just incremental refinements? What
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The "What's a polygon" one was an absolute corker.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm on break from volunteering, free pizza and coke. I'd say my day has been more productive than yours.
Mom - stuffed crust pizza.
Yes. Depends on the level of monopoly. (Score:1)
Internet Explorer being an obviois example of not innovating because of a monopoly.
And Chrome is an example of using *too much* (often not needed) "innovation" (or generally: changes), to create and sustain a monopoly.
In a competitive market, nobody can afford to not innovate, let alone just sit on it!
But companies *hate* competition. For natural and obvious reasons.
Hence that whole "intellectual property" thing. A state-protected monopoly for artificial scarcity on something that costs absolutely nothing t
Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we typically get innovation in products "shortly after the necessary techniques are discovered and mastered",
Yes, when there is competition to be had, it happens quickly.
or do we rather get cool innovation handed to us "in a planned fashion" -- at a deliberately delayed future date when the manufacturer thinks it will achieve the greatest finanical return from selling the innovation to the end user?
Yes, when there is a dominant party that has a monopoly on a particular technology (e.g. patents) then we have a long delayed rollout.
Almost nothing in the world is as black and white as you propose.
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost nothing in the world is as black and white as you propose.
Pretty much nothing is. But only extreme, black vs. white stories capture attention, so they all get hyped all out of proportion.
Re: (Score:2)
From the outside, it might look like the consumer is first, because marketing is good at making them feel that way. In reality there are a lot of different priorities, each person in a large corporation has their own set.
Wrong question (Score:5, Insightful)
It really depends on whether the innovation will make their product obsolete or their competition's product obsolete.
Re: (Score:2)
Excellent point. A lot of old, inefficient, environment unfriendly products are kept in the market because better ones would cut into the profit margin, at least in the short term.
Re: (Score:3)
Nice sound bite, but it's pretty empty.
Much of products that are not software has to do with supply chain. Watching competitive supply chain orders tips their hand. And if you can't get supply chain, or it's potentially disrupted, or many vendors are involved, the coordination takes time and keeping in price targets is like multi-level chess.
Margins keep companies alive, and keeping profitability means you get to eat tomorrow and the next day. Asian supply chain can be very incestuous and help spread the wo
Re: (Score:2)
Grandkids?
Mining junkyards was a business plan at IBM for aluminum 15 year ago.
I'm for it. We've already ruined those areas. It saves building another mine somewhere else.
A little from column A, a little from column B. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere in-between these two extremes.
I'm sure there are definitely cases of companies working out something amazing and rushing it to market as quickly as quickly as they can in order to get a first-mover advantage. Equally, there are cases of companies sitting on tech to trickle-feed it over a longer period of time - often when they are seen as being ahead in their market segment.
The risk of rushing to market is that you may run out of ideas later on in the pipeline, or you may deliver something half-baked. The risk of controlling releases over a longer period of time is that someone else may slingshot past you and take the lead.
Intel and NVIDIA are both in the position where they have been withholding technical advances while they were in a dominant market position. AMD is now gaining very quickly on both of them. Only time will tell if their gamble will pay off, or if they sat on their laurels for too long and now they will have to play catch up for a while.
Re:A little from column A, a little from column B. (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel and NVIDIA are both in the position where they have been withholding technical advances while they were in a dominant market position. AMD is now gaining very quickly on both of them. Only time will tell if their gamble will pay off, or if they sat on their laurels for too long and now they will have to play catch up for a while.
You know, I think it has become very obvious that Intel has not been withholding anything. If they had, they could have nicely countered what AMD is doing at the moment. But Intel seems to have absolutely nothing besides a few meaningless stunts.
Re: (Score:3)
You've raised a fair point there. Intel really do seem to have been caught out, it'll be interesting to see what they counter AMD with. They still lead (only just) in single-threaded performance but AMD have more cores than them at a lower price. Will Intel end up going the same way, or will they put more work into improving IPC?
Re: (Score:3)
It will be very interesting to see. AMD is several years ahead of Intel in sheer customizability, since they basically compile their CPUs now. Intel still seems to do hand-optimized designs and that may be why they can compete at all with an inferior manufacturing process. We also all know that Intel gets at least part of their speed from producing quite insecure CPUs, something were the current AMD generation is significantly ahead as well. Does probably not matter much for the average home user, but cloud
Re: (Score:2)
As far as I know they ALL were insecure, not just Intel, but I stand to be corrected.
Re: (Score:2)
As far as I know they ALL were insecure, not just Intel, but I stand to be corrected.
"Insecurity" is often not an absolute. AMD was never vulnerable to Meltdown. And the Spectre variants are much, much harder to exploit or do not work at all on AMD ZEN 1 as they use a different mechanism for branch prediction. As these things are already hard to exploit on Intel, AMD may effectively be not vulnerable in ZEN 1. And ZEN 2 contains additional fixes. Anybody claiming that this is the same thing on Intel and AMD is just lying. Also note that the possibility of such attacks has been discussed in
Re: (Score:2)
OK, so at the same clock speed Intel would lead slightly (Intel is at 3.5 GHz and AMD is at 3.8 GHz). At stock clock speeds AMD is ahead by 4% and at Max OC speeds Intel is ahead slightly by 2%. In other words, neck and neck on their flagship processors. Granted, AMD is half the price, so if you're comparing instructions per dollar, then they're light-years ahead.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd say that Intel has been withholding CPUs with higher core counts from the consumer market, for as long as they haven't had much competition.
But that's not really a technical innovation but more about configuration, marketing and pricing: keeping the workstation/server and consumer grade equipment separate.
Re: (Score:2)
Intel designed assuming their world leading process development teams would deliver as they have always done. They designed (as did all in the business) not thinking about potential security problems in something as basic as speculative execution with the only limit being reducing fixup impact. They likely underestimated the performance of new AMD designs after a long time of essential failures.
Then Spectre and more importantly Meltdown happened with a more severe impact than on AMD designs.
Then Intel proce
Re: (Score:2)
Some startups will still rush to market to get first-mover advantage. This can work if your goal is to be bought by one of the big companies, but if you think you can build up market dominance from one innovation, get ready to be disappointed.
The reality is that there is more often a first mover disadvantage. Software in particular is difficult to adequately cover with patent protection, the patents take too long to come through, and it is easy for competitors to come up with equivalent but different enou
Re: (Score:2)
There's a second component too:
When you patent it, the clock starts ticking. It doesn't make a ton of sense to patent and then sit on the patent, unless you're just trying to sell it or use it for negotiation, or block a competitor. The last thing you want to do is publish and sit on it until the patent expires and everyone then jumps on it.
If you have a brilliant thing to kick ass with but a plethora of current things in the pipeline, better to sit on it. The downside is that if someone else patents it fir
There's a formula for this (Score:5, Interesting)
I work as a Software Engineer for a very large Fintech company.
Short answer, you don't "hold on to" anything if it can be scheduled into a deliverable that creates marketable business value.
There's actually a formula for this within Agile methodology, Weighted Shortest Job First [scaledagileframework.com].
Insofar as companies are making these decisions subjectively in the manner suggested by the summary, I would say that is rapidly becoming no longer the case by leading companies.
Re: (Score:3)
If it ever was. There is also the real risk of somebody else finding it independently. You monetize as soon as you are able if you are smart.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Regression testing is just the act of running your old tests and see that they still pass. That goes for unit, integration, system and acceptance tests, be they manual (yes, they still exist) or automatic. The article you point to even says that (though just about unit and integration tests).
You seem to be so riled up about something that you see goblins where there aren't any.
(I am happy to bash on capital Agile in general and SAFe in particular, so I think we are in the same camp there.)
Re: There's a formula for this (Score:2)
Re: There's a formula for this (Score:3)
Don't forget that some tech don't make it into products until legally required.
Look at seat belts for cars, they weren't mainstream until legally required, and there are still people around not using them.
Re: (Score:2)
If I may say, you "hold onto" a technology that would obsolete a current product or compete with another division of your company. You also "hold onto" technologies that would compete with other companies with which you have deliberate market control, such as when a board member is on interlocking directorships.
Re: (Score:2)
Few companies anymore have R&D departments that do real fundamental research into new ideas that might not be profitable for a decade or more. It's too expensive. A lot of really good ideas have come from a string of failed companies who tried to take ideas from academia and make them marketable. Sometimes ideas are old but just not practical in the climate of the time, sometimes taking ideas that were common place in end computing and migrating them to PCs as they got faster. Today's business world i
Bell Labs (Score:2)
Bell Laboratories was a perfect example of stifling innovation for the status quo. They invented the first tape recorder somewhere in the 20's/30's but upper management killed it for fear that people would mail voice letters to each other rather than use the phone.
We know lots of companies are sitting on massive patent portfolios solely to use them for litigation with no intention of ever producing a single product with them, and that isn't including patent trolls. So yes, barring industry shakeups or tru
Re: (Score:2)
> We know lots of companies are sitting on massive patent portfolios solely to use them for litigation with no intention of ever producing a single product with them,
This is partly because most of the patents are invalid. But fighting them in court is extremely expensive, and can bankrupt many smaller or startup businesses because it's so difficult to avoid violating at least _one_ patent from a large portfolio, even if the patent is invalid.
Patent Wars (Score:1)
Fear of being sued and/or actual lawsuits by big companies probably stifles a lot of innovation. That's why I believe there should be an upper limit on required royalties.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Patents should be more difficult to get as well, now days they are simplistic regurgitation of common sense ideas and existing technologies slightly tweaked. Patents today are nearly pointless, they serve only as ammunition against the competition's arsenal of patents. I don't think many companies really want to drive this dumbed down patent style but they're stuck in that trap. I think the patent system should change so that there is a demostration and evidence for the patent being innovative (beyond si
Re: (Score:1)
Small professional inventors often claim that if it's too hard to get a patent or if patents don't pay off enough, they'd have to go into another line of business.
Maybe that's no big deal, as most things will get organically invented along the way and people will stop fretting over the origin of ideas.
It does seem like the drama and overhead of patents perhaps exceeds the benefits of having them, especially software patents. But it's hard to objectively measure without forking Earth and watching technical p
I advocate this position as analytical chemist (Score:2)
This follows the principle that one should not operate at the extreme edges of capability, when long term stability and consistency are a primary goal. Data from the edges should be used as internal diagnostics and should be actively researched but not used as a control.
Definitely spontaneous (Score:2)
Unless you count things that are not tech discoveries as "innovations". A lot of what is mistakenly called an "innovation" these days is either old tech hyped for some business or political purpose or things that are not even technology. The only thing companies will sit on are things where they see absolutely no purpose and no profit in patenting them. Everything else will at the very least get patented when it is ready or some time before that. And patents are public.
Innovation? (Score:2)
Most of the innovation we currently see is the purchase and integration of new'improved ideas by a few large companies who integrate these new ideas into their stable of products. Or just buy the IP and bury it.
Most of the current innovations in tech products seem to be the removal of features in previous products. (think headphone jacks, removable batteries, user up gradable components like memory, disks...)
Other than having "more" memory, disk space, processors, higher pixel count, computers for the end u
Define Innovative. (Score:2)
Similar to bobstreo's (a href="https://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=14456540&cid=59003468">comment I think you need to define innovation. Nearly everything I've worked on, which has been "innovative", has been an application of a well-known technology, in a way that hasn't exactly been done before. It hasn't actually been innovative.
I think an actually innovative product comes about once every five to ten years. Past that, I'd say there are either incremental improvements, or just straight up mar
Re: (Score:3)
Seems to me that the person who submitted this doesn't understand the difference between science and engineering, and also doesn't understand the difference between discovery and design, and also doesn't understand the difference between invention and innovation.
And, neither do you. That's not an insult. You're part of the majority.
Innovation IS the application of a known technology in a way that hasn't exactly been done before. That is literally the definition of innovation.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think augmented reality has resulted in an innovative product, yet, for the average person. I would put Google Glass into the same category as the Xerox PARC products which no one picked up, and did anything with, until they did.
Just like in the entertainment business (Score:2)
Always leave them wanting more.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Mostly spontaneous (Score:3)
But "upgrade" planned? Moooost companies that does that sees their marketshare fall as they desperately try to catch up to competitors. See Apple's useless recent iphones and massive fall in sales because, as Wozniak put it nigh, they're identical to each other; even as other phone makers try to either race to the bottom price or a few actually try to put things people want in like giant batteries. Others fields are finally seeing competition too, cough Intel, and even worse Nvidia who's "Super" RTX cards could've just as easily come out last year but suddenly there's a tiny bit of competition so they actually have to make products as good as they can be instead of limiting them for no reason.
My only real complaint is cameras, every fucking camera maker is useless. Phones have had fancy computational photography to make phone cameras look way better for years now, but only one camera maker that no one cares about (Olympus) has even bothered to put such into their bigger cameras so far. When you're being charged $4,000 for a single use device you'd expect it to at least match that $800 multi use device in the one overlapping category! But nooo, stupid assed cameramaker industry can burn and die for all I care, there's newer cameras out that don't even have USB C charging for fuck's sake!
Re: (Score:2)
The technology behind 5G wasn't planned. The introduction and rollout, and marketing would have to take time anyway, so it was planned.
They started the roll-out of components before the technological foundation had been finalised. They thought that R&D would catch up. But the technology turned out to be half-assed, and should really have gone through a few iterations in the lab before parts of it were deployed.
See story posted yesterday [slashdot.org] for more info.
Both. (Score:3)
Both, depending on the situation and the context of the market. Companies in highly competitive spaces racing to beat each other to the next big breakthrough will put technology into production as soon as it is ready. Companies with the luxury of waiting to maximize profits and R&D will wait as long as they can.
There is a third option here, however: Technology can be both long-planned *and* spontaneous. It is entirely possible to have a very difficult problem you need to solve that you invest a great deal of R&D into. After a decade of work, you find the solution you've been searching for. In this case, a long, steady investment yielded the result that allows for quick deployment thereafter.
In other cases, the long, slow, grinding work simply yields a usable product. Both OLED and EUV technology are examples of projects that were trumpeted 10-15 years before being ready for commercial deployment. It took OLED TVs over a decade to get to market. Intel started talking about Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography back in 2002. They thought it'd be ready, IIRC, by 2004 - 2005.
EUV will actually be ready for manufacturing in 2020, 15-16 years after the research on it began.
Innovation (Score:2)
Honestly the last big breakthrough in tech was the transistor. After that everything has been incremental. Go ahead and name something. It's all based on something older and closely related.
Re: (Score:2)
The transistor is a refinement of the diode, and also the vacuum tube - while they differ in operation they utilize some of the same principles.
Not paced at any company I've worked at. (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked at large enterprise-y high tech companies for my entire career. I've never seen an innovation which wasn't brought to market as quickly as possible. "Quickly as possible" was generally constrained by how much money we'd want to throw at a new product and how many people were available (because there are always competing priorities--do you fix bugs in old releases or work on new features?)
I've never even been a conversation where the though of "well, we could release this in Q2 but we're intentionally going to delay" came up.
Re:Not paced at any company I've worked at. (Score:4, Insightful)
Pipelines (Score:1)
Many industries use a development pipeline. Build product, put in pipleline for eventual release. This occurs both when the innovations are many and rapid or if they are anemic. (Such as when outside R&D is purchased or if the innovators are only on staff short term.)
For larger corporations, release pipelines, or outright product pipelines, are one of the key factors in stock price stability long term. As such, publically traded companies meet their obligations to shareholders by holding back, and would
Competition of internal resources (Score:3)
ROI (Score:1)
IBM (Score:2)
IBM has been storing up patents and inventions for decades, were doing it when Dad worked for them in the 50s. Absolutely deliberately delayed.
It's planned by Hari Seldon (Score:2)
It's The Money (Score:1)
Spontaneous because... (Score:5, Funny)
I think market leaders want controlled evolution (Score:2)
I think the market leaders with established products want controlled evolution, where they dribble out a slow but steady trickle of improvements over time.
This keeps people on support contracts which include upgrades because they see themselves as continually upgrading to new features and happy to pay the contract. If there were no updates or they were spaced far apart, people would be less likely to pay for them.
In the absence of any competition, I think you get near zero improvements unless it makes the
Want is cute (Score:2)
Employees are on the ground-floor of these innovations.
Sure, they sign off their patents to their bosses, but they were there. They're still thinking about that "never to be released" product. And they've thought of another (unpatented) way to build it.
So they quit, patent the idea themselves, and visit a VC with their earth-shattering idea. That's largely what Silicon Valley has been for 2 decades. Some even get sued for being too similar, but it rarely matters much.
There's the people who they they have co
Ideas (innovations) are a dime a dozen... (Score:2)
It's selling them that is hard. One person's "improvement" is another person's annoyance.
Take Notepad++ for example. It's far and away better than Notepad. I love it and use it daily. But for my father-in-law, he would be completely mystified by all the features.
Steve Jobs didn't invent the smartphone, he just convinced everyone that they needed one.
So it does indeed take time to get people to adopt new technology, even if it is clearly superior to predecessors.
Re: (Score:1)
Kudos to the ac who posted the information further up the thread.
Re: (Score:1)
Look at you. Everyone who follows the link sees how much of a whining man child you were when you first tried to push your stupid shit and got