Quick note: I am old enough to remember the very early days of the internet in the early 90s and back then no one knew what its "nail" was either. It let you do all these random things--look up the weather, sports scores, exchange text messages with strangers--but a common theme at the time was that while this was all very cool, how was anyone going to actually make money with it. So plus ça change and all that.
Totally, but this is the story VCs tell themselves about any early-stage technology. Survivorship bias means everyone talks about the internet and not about any of the multitude of purposeless technologies that didn't command 100x returns on early investment. And even then, consider that, if you extend the metaphor, no one (to my knowledge) got angry when the early commercial internet didn't do exactly the thing they wanted it to do. It was hard to say it "failed" in the same way that people claim LLM chatbots "fail" because expectations were much more properly calibrated.
Yes and no Max. Back then people were more civil in public discourse and there was no social media to amplify angry voices, no way that anyone other than "experts" had a voice, period. So everything was anecdotal.
But plenty of people thought the internet was stupid and the promises--shopping in your underwear--were things no one wanted. Remember that even with a new super-fast 14.4 modem, it could take 15 minutes (and several failed attempts) to actually log on to Prodigy to check the score of the previous night's Mets game. So many people saw it as overpromise and couldn't wrap their heads around the notion that what took 15 minutes in 1994 would be more or less instant in 2024.
Or to put it in more basic terms, late night talk show hosts got a lot of mileage from jokes about how "that internet thing" was nothing but a waste of time.
Quick note: I am old enough to remember the very early days of the internet in the early 90s and back then no one knew what its "nail" was either. It let you do all these random things--look up the weather, sports scores, exchange text messages with strangers--but a common theme at the time was that while this was all very cool, how was anyone going to actually make money with it. So plus ça change and all that.
Totally, but this is the story VCs tell themselves about any early-stage technology. Survivorship bias means everyone talks about the internet and not about any of the multitude of purposeless technologies that didn't command 100x returns on early investment. And even then, consider that, if you extend the metaphor, no one (to my knowledge) got angry when the early commercial internet didn't do exactly the thing they wanted it to do. It was hard to say it "failed" in the same way that people claim LLM chatbots "fail" because expectations were much more properly calibrated.
Yes and no Max. Back then people were more civil in public discourse and there was no social media to amplify angry voices, no way that anyone other than "experts" had a voice, period. So everything was anecdotal.
But plenty of people thought the internet was stupid and the promises--shopping in your underwear--were things no one wanted. Remember that even with a new super-fast 14.4 modem, it could take 15 minutes (and several failed attempts) to actually log on to Prodigy to check the score of the previous night's Mets game. So many people saw it as overpromise and couldn't wrap their heads around the notion that what took 15 minutes in 1994 would be more or less instant in 2024.
Or to put it in more basic terms, late night talk show hosts got a lot of mileage from jokes about how "that internet thing" was nothing but a waste of time.