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People Often Deride Game Changing Technology as 'a Toy' (medium.com)
Steven Sinofsky, former President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, has cataloged how often game-changing technologies have been derided as toys. Some of the things he has included in the list include a PC, C programming, PC networking, GUI, color screen, AI, and internet video. He writes: As many have recognized, when inventions and innovations first appear they are often (always) labeled as "toys" or "incapable" of doing "real work" or providing "real entertainment." Of course, many new inventions don't work out the way inventors had hoped, though quite frequently it is just a matter of timing and the coming together of a variety of circumstances. It can be said that being labeled a toy is necessary, but not sufficient, to become the next big thing. This got me thinking about all the conferences, trip reports, and new products I have looked at over many years. Sure turns out that a huge number of things in my own career were labeled as toys -- not just by me, but by an industry at large. Check out the list on Medium.
Was a toy, still is a toy, and always will be a toy.
Sheesh.
sure sure, you may be the exception. but you may in fact be a toy.
Enough said. Watch the flow of negative replies under this post.
They laughed at Columbus - but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
I still consider them as toys.
This is not news, this does not matter, this is not thought-provoking.
This is some suit's banal blog-spam.
Leave it on medium.com where it belongs, along with the other shite
Brand new technology rarely as well fleshed out as existing technologies, This is the obvious statement news at 11.
>it's a medium article
"People Often Deride Game Changing Technology as 'a Toy'"
That is ridiculous. Things that change games are properly classified as "sports equipment".
Clippy was once a "toy" Microsoft sent to annoy millions of office workers just trying to get something written and go the hell home.
After a sex change (not that there's anything wrong with that), he/she's back to annoy over a billion people as "Cortana" (que the ESPY awards) whether they are at work or not.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/15/5617234/clippy-replaces-cortana-in-windows-phone-easter-egg
it still is unreadably sucky.
This article is just a list of game-changing technologies coupled to unsourced assertions that these were derided as toys when they were first introduced.
I don't recall a widespread opinion that color monitors, sound cards, digital cameras, wireless networking or AI were "toys" when first introduced. If anything, I recall and endless stream of over-hyped articles about how they heralded the second coming of Christ.
foo mane padme hum
Some things which have been game changers have been dismissed as toys. Just because your shit was dismissed as being a toy doesn't make it a game changer either.
All that shit Microsoft said was a game changer but nobody gave a damn about? Not game changers.
The only thing which differentiates the two is reality of what has actually happened. But the history of people saying "this will revolutionize the world", or "in 5 years we'll all be doing X" -- well, the pundits seem to have a far worse track record of telling us what will happen than what won't.
How many of us have spent decades seeing the stuff the pundits and futurists said would change our lives, only to have them fizzle out into nothing?
If we stamped 100% of all ideas as "toy" or "garbage", I bet we'd be right 80% of the time. People suck at predicting the future.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Techno-obsessed people, especially in modern startup culture, claim their useless toy technology is "game changing".
They're frequently derided as mere idle chatter, trolling and entertainment. And yet...
Oh wait.
Decades later, people will dig up the quotes about the new thing that has survived all these years, make a big story about it and feel smug about it. Many new things that actually turned out to be dumb (NeXT? Newton? That Timex+Microsoft chimera watch that downloaded data by the blinking[*] CRT montor? Plasma TV? HD-DVD? TurboPascal? FoxBase? Quattro spreadsheet? ), and the new things that were merely ahead of their time (geocities? myspace?) will be forgotten...
[*] Actual blinking, blinking not used as a euphemism
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
None of these things were considered "toys" when first introduced. Who ever said the "C programming language" was a "toy"??? No wonder this guy is VP at MS. He is clueless.
Every new thing is a 'toy' because it's unproven in the real world. An academic paper, or lab experiment, or startup company doesn't mean much. And for every 'toy' that ends up being the next big thing there are thousands that are failures.
And that's why research, and experimentation, and startups are so important. It takes hundreds or thousands of failures to find one success story, but the benefits of that one success pay for the failures a thousand-fold.
the ONLY "new tech" ive ever heard all that said about is the iPad, and it has pretty much shown true - a fantastic consumtion device, but very limited in the creation or modification of data - so "work" tasks are sortof limited.
All other new tech that I have seen isnt derided for being toys, its usually called too expensive, but not really a toy per se.
How would this ever have been considered a toy? Small, non-mechanical and fast, seems like the future to me. Yeah it was expensive when it first came to market but like most tech you know its going to improve and get cheaper as time goes by.
Oh great just what we need an article implicitly encouraging unfalsifiable statements and cherry picking to fit narratives.
Yep. I regard the whole keyboard retardation with cherry switches and leds and ricing about as "game changing" as a headphone nut taping crystals on their shit for "better sound".
Toy shit no different from that cringe inducing idiotic heatsink crap Gigabyte and MSI do to their motherboards by designing them in the form of guns and bullets and other cringe inducing crap.
The prime example is Edison calling the air plane a toy and therefore declining to work on it.
It's a list claiming things are toys, yet there is no link to other articles for proof. Even if it did, that wouldn't constitute any sort of consensus or public opinion on the matter. For instance, one item is "Internet is a toy" even though Internet access had been used for business and other uses for years. Consumer access to websites at the time could have been considered more of a toy since there wasn't a ton of stuff that could be done with it. (In 1995, there was some shopping and games, with some research on top of that.)
Immature technologies can be considered toys, I guess. Microsoft had a Tablet PC, but those were bulk, unbalanced, and expensive. Apple fixed those problems thanks both to design (cut down OS) and technology improvements (SD storage, integrated WiFi, etc.). The iPad was a better product than those early Tablet PCs.
Likewise, a digital camera is 1993 was probably expensive and low resolution, so it had little use beyond gadget geeks. Professional photographers would still use film and average consumers wouldn't pay those high prices.
Same with soundcards: compare the first soundcards with ones released a decade later and you'll see massive improvements.
1994 streaming technology? In 2000 I saw some streaming video in glorious 156x120 resolution. Couldn't replace television then.
If anything, the article is proof that people shouldn't be first adopters for expensive technology that will be replaced with something better.
I looked down the entire list: well, yeah... they're all toys. What's wrong with that?
I love my toys. The fact that I happen to make a living using some of those toys is really immaterial.
Repeat something that is true most of the time eventually it will be false. It is the reverse of the "even a broken clock is right twice a day".
The list on Medium suffers from selection bias. It is merely a list of times when calling a new technology a "toy" was false. It says nothing about the number of times saying "it's a toy" was true.
The reason a lot of things are "a toy" is because the initial practical use is not obvious, so it's considered something that time will be wasted on. This is exactly the same way Drones were about 5 years ago. Drones were always considered toys, even though their predecessors (analog radio control planes and cars) never moved past "toy" or "hobby"
Right now "VR" is is in it's third or so incarnation of "it's a toy" phase. The first incarnation was the Viewmaster, and the second incarnation was the early 1990's before people started getting horribly sick from it. "3D" films never moved past "toy" phase.
What the article probably wants to point out and fails to do, is that we often dismiss things as "toys" because "we" don't get it, rather than discover a practical use for the technology, we just refuse to use it. This is why 3D stuff and VR stuff didn't take off before. It's too much of a pain in the ass to use.
Think about WiFi. The first generation WiFi stuff was released in the late 1990's, That stuff sucked, was insecure, and high latency. 802.11b was released in 1999 but no hardware made use of it till 2004, right when 802.11g hardware was becoming common. Likewise look at "3G UMTS" and "LTE", these were promised years before they ever became mainstream, and only became adopted due to bandwidth crunches, otherwise mobile networks would be content with offering us as little as possible at the highest price possible.
When the Mac came out, it was a "toy". They derided it and their fanboys derided it. All the while, they thought it was so cool and so important that they were working on a horrid copy.
"The Beatles have no future in show business,"
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Well, he wasn't entirely wrong. When the iPhone first came out, it wasn't that great for productivity. Sites weren't mobile-friendly, it only had shitty EDGE cellular internet, didn't have (official) third party app support. Back then, you had to jailbreak it for the thing to be usable.
It's possibly worth noting here that "Game changing" does not necessitate "good". For instance, Windows 8 could be said to have been "Game changing", given how big a turd it was.
Certainly changed Sinofsky's game, at any rate.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
-- not just by me, but by an industry at large.
Dont get me started. As a scientist here on spider skull island ive created numerous game changing technologies. For example, I created a disruptive app that uses high energy laserbeams to "disrupt" regular people into charred piles of ash, but my colleagues dismissed the whole thing as "impractical" for holding an entire city hostage. absurd!
i have a new game changing technology im trying out on the city of Metropolis right now that I think will be a real winner if i can just keep those darn haters off my back. You see, it changes regular parking meters into a game by causing every other one to randomly explode into a shower of molten metal and sparks whenever someone doesnt pay my one million dollar ransom. **sigh**
but knowing my colleagues im sure its going nowhere fast. Dr. Doom (congratulations on your dissertation that melted the entire physics department into a sentient fluid!) has already come up with a scaleable, licensed and renewable heat ray hes using to heat the very breath in your lungs to plasma. Oh and dont get me started on countess chaos...shes invented some kind of innovative and transformational technology at a ted conference that transformed the innards of the entire audience into highly unstable raw sodium. shes just...so creative.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Steven Sinofsky, former President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, has cataloged how often game-changing technologies have been derided as toys...
By Him?
That would explain Microsoft chasing Technology not leading it.
Can you show me a game-changing technology that was completely productive on it's first try? Many times it takes a few software updates or even hardware generations to become productive. This is also why many businesses are reluctant to purchase a brand new product that doesn't have much of a history. Can't blame them for being skeptical when money is involved.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
**lyric stolen from Drivin N Cryin'
In order to get something to market it has to be sold to people, selling something on merit is infinitely harder than selling something on interest.
...now how long do I have to wait after saying that for the tech to become low cost and widely available?
and yet sometimes they are toys.
This is consistent with the principles discussed in Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. Low-end products with a new value proposition eventually become good enough to overtake the high-end products.
I still think of my iPhone as a toy computer. That doesn't mean I don't use it or like it, but it still feels extremely limited compared to a desktop computer (which I think of as a "real computer").
Mac, iPad, etc.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I still think anything other than the Nomad is lame.
This is the same idiot I mentioned yesterday in a comment because he was on some other website saying "As the CIO of a major international Fortune 500 company, I can tell you that the Commodore 64 is completely unhackable."
In the early 2000's I remember thinking this about camera phones. After all, why would you want a camera in your phone when "real" camera takes pictures that are so much better. Just a toy really ...
Nowadays it's almost the opposite. Why do you need a camera when you have a perfectly good one in your phone.
If something is not fun to use, then it isn't a toy.
If something isn't fun to use, then it is likely to never go anywhere, no matter how much people think it is important to their personal product/use.
But merely being fun does not mean it is also useful.
To be a game changer, it must be useful, and also fun. Then people will use it. If it isn't fun, someone will find a better way.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
To be fair Facebook seems like a toy.
I don't know any serious organization or person which uses Facebook as a means of publishing serious data in the first place.
Perhaps there are serious ways in which FB can be used, but I cannot think of any. Communications? People still end up using their cell phones to set up meetings or exchange the most important information. Spreading of serious information/news/etc? FB is almost always secondary. Ah, blogging ... no, most serious bloggers user wordpress/blogger/LiveJournal.
What makes a device a toy can really be in the eye of the beholder.
Most of us, at some point in our lives, have built something out of wood. I'll use the example of the beloved birdhouse as an illustration. When we made the birdhouse we probably chose wood based on cost and some sense of appropriateness - most likely dimension of depth. We cut the wood with any saw that was handy, and either glued the parts together or used some sort of small, cheap nails. That was about it. Our birdhouse probably turned out well, not because we are master craftsmen but because a birdhouse is easy to make.
Compare that to what master craftsman does. First, a craftsman would probably never bother to make something as simple as a birdhouse. The entire idea of making a birdhouse would be considered a "toy" project and left to neophytes and children. Second, any craftsman would probably only undertake a project for pay, so that any project done for free would be considered an amateur project. Third, a craftsman would choose his wood based on multiple criteria and neither dimension nor cost would be one of those. Fourth, the craftsman would own many, many tools of the same sort and know which tool would be best for each type of wood and each task to be performed. Last, wood joinery is a skill all by itself and a true craftsman might not even use fasteners or glue of any type.
My point here is that, to an advanced user steeped in the arcane knowledge of a powerful, flexible system, anything with less power or flexibility would be considered a toy.
TFA causes a loss in IQ - Labels like "toy", "Fad", and even "Game changing" are simply labels. There are far more failures than successes. Basic mathematics should be all it takes to realize that the label makes no difference in the statement. Things labelled "toys" failed at roughly the same rate as things labelled "game changers", and "must have", and "earth shattering", etc.. etc...
Society ends up placing the proper label on things. The label does not make the product, the product makes the label.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Microsoft was right to sack this terribly-misguided clown due to his poor decision-making, so why should anyone listen to what he has to say?
After all, they're the ones usually labeling and deriding huge breakthroughs as mere toys. You know, things like the iPhone, the Internet, 1MB ram.
The article is merely a list of technologies that some people might have referred to as "toys" when they first appeared. There are not links, and nothing indicates that was the prevalent opinion at the time. I'm sure it is possible to find references with "people" calling the same technologies "revolutionary".
Many of the things that are labelled a "toy" really are. Others are until someone drops millions on R&D to make it useful.
"PC is a toy"
The PC in 1981 *was* a toy. With 16 kilobytes of memory, no concept of directories, and a ludicrous buy-in required, it was a niche machine. Lotus 1-2-3 was two years away. Obviously it was a toy with a great deal of potential, but it took a lot of time to get there.
“C programming language is a toy”
When I google this, it takes me to the article and no place else. If this quote is real, it wasn't a very popular opinion. By 1982, C had been used for Unix for a decade or something- how a popular and standard OS and its myriad of tools was dismissed as "toy-like" isn't obvious to me, and I'd be surprised to find out that this claim got much purchase. Assuming it exists. I mean, it must, right? Someone had to be clueless.
"Mouse is a toy", "GUI is a toy"
GUIs were a toy in the early 80s, and so were mice. With a mouse driver chewing up your precious RAM and an utter lack of support, it took a long time before a mouse was considered something that you could assume your users would own. Windows could be run entirely from the keyboard for this reason. Despite being so good at its thing, it took a long damned time before it had real use.
"Email on a pager is a toy"
And it was. We don't all have email enabled pagers, we have touchscreens that didn't exist back then with high res displays that didn't exist back then running on batteries that didn't exist back then with a huge wad of software that cost a ton of time and money to create. Smartphones aren't email pagers that got bigger, smartphones are PCs that shrunk.
Many of the others, I don't think anyone believed. I don't know anyone who dismissed VOIP, the Macintosh, Flash storage, Youtube, or touch screens. Facebook is STILL a toy, it just has large buy-in and a bunch of money. Hell, people keep creating things that will be "the next facebook", and those are mostly toys too- if one catches on and turns facebook into myspace, that won't really change that. Cloud has never been a toy, but its certainly been oversold, and most of the critiques mock that point- the upsides of clouds are hyped, the downsides ignored.
The list has some good points on it, but mostly it deals with technologies that took years to decades, and tons of research and development, to leave their "toy" status behind. If you call something gimmicky and then it catches on twenty years later after all the underlying tech has changed, that doesn't make you wrong.
The primary reason the iPhone was popular (even around here) was that its browser didn't require sites to be mobile friendly. Before the iPhone mobile browsing sucked.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Is that a toy? Huh? Or jet packs and flying cars? Robot maids and butlers?
What about swarms of drones carrying cargo?
This has certainly been the case for the DNA Sequencer I've been doing "technology development" on. It's been almost impossible to get people to treat it like a useful, serious sequencing device.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I was mobile browsing on my Palm Treo just fine before the iPhone. It didn't require sites to have special content either. I had the touch version so it was pretty easy to zoom around. I also had SIP calling on the Treo which you couldn't get on the iPhone for a few years after its initial launch. It annoyed me that carriers started blocking it on Android. The SIP calling was nice, I had wifi through-out the property and was rarely ever at my desk.
The iPhone was most certainly a toy when it first came out. Since then it has come a long way and you can actually do some pretty decent stuff now.
Of course I will forever despise it for the iTunes lock-in. Even iTunes has come a long way, although its still a pig that I'd rather not ever have to see again, except that my girlfriend has about $10k invested in crap from iTunes over the years. Course she is pissed off enough that her iPhone died after 6 months that she's not in a hurry to get access to the content anymore and is buying new stuff on Amazon that can be accessed for every other device we have.
I was mobile browsing on the Palm Treo as well and, frankly, I think you're remembering it through Rose-colored glasses. It technically worked but everything was formatted in a screwy way and didn't have the zooming options we're familiar with now. It was a step up from IE on Windows mobile, but the Safari browser blew it away. The only real advantage Palm had was it had working copy/paste.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Being considered a toy is a requirement for being a game changer. If a technology is taken seriously early on, it's inmediately locked down with patents and pricetags by big business. That's why toys always win in the long run.
iPhone? Toy. Who want's that? ... Whooops.
PC? Toy. Here are the specs and the architecture, for free. Go play. We sell real computers. 20 years later x86 is all there is.
The Web? A toy.
PHP? JavaScript? Toy languages, laughed out of the room, even still yet. While everybodys laughing, they're taking over the web. Well, PHP at least.
WordPress? Yet another shitty CMS/bloggin engine by someone who can't programm. Toy. Oh. 102 Million active installs. 25% of the web. Mmmh.
Toys win, because they initialy aren't taken seriously and thus have room to get adopted by those who want to build stuff without being at the mercy of some psychopath corporation. Once they've gained traction it's to late to box them in and everybody has to follow suit to stay in the game.
It's that simple.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Seriously, most new stuff is junk and even the survivors of the shakeout were often pretty lousy in their first offerings.
This article could be interesting if it included references to who said what and in which context. Just saying "[[tech]] is a toy." without further developing or even including at least a reference is pointless - one could come up with just about any tech as an example whenever real or not.
This article is unfortunately nothing more than a waste of time :(
The Palm Treo 600 had a perfectly usable browser for 2003. The iPhone didn't come out until 4 years later, so of course it had a better browser.
Despite being 4 years older, the Treo 600 was still better for browsing in some ways. The iPhone may have had pinch to zoom in its browser, but the Treo had a real keyboard.
I've lost count of the number of times I've heard people deride something new as a toy, although they seem to be wising up lately.
. Personal Computers ("Fad, won't be around in 10 years")
. Programming ("Not even making anything real there, waste of time")
. Computers on cars ("There is no way they can work in a hash environment like a car")
. C language ("Real businesses don't use languages like that")
. Linux ("Who the hell is going to use a home-made operating system?")
. Open source ("We're supposed to put our trust in a bunch of crap code written by hippies? No thanks")
. Phones for any use other than phone calls
. Home automation ("Technology for its own sake is bullshit")
. Robots ("Science fiction, never happen")
. IoT
Strangely, I fly the hell out of drones as a middle-aged man. And not one person with an opinion I place any value on has said anything about how they're toys, although at this point, the vast majority of them are. From the list above, I've turned the majority of them into ways to make money, so maybe by now they've gotten the point that many things that start out as toys eventually turn into something more.
The Palm web browser didnt work on a lot of sites that the iPhone did and the keyboard didn't matter that much unless you were using it to spend an inordinate amout of time posting on forums... where the wysiwyg interfaces never worked. The iPhone also had wifi from day 1.
Again, rose-colored glasses.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
New technology usually are toys. They are immature and not road-tested. Hobbyists fortunately don't mind taking the proverbial arrows in the back to find the kinks and build/find uses for them.
The first photographs required sitting perfectly still for 5 minutes; the first phonographs had the quality of rusted tin cans with a nose plug; the first cars broke down often and required lots of fiddling to keep going, their starter mechanisms often braking arms; the first electronic computers took more time replacing vacuum tubes than computing; the first satellites kept blowing up on the launch pad; the first PC's had crappy software, unreliable storage, and crashed often for no reason; the Newton was bulky and slow; the Lisa & Mac were too expensive for most home/biz users and lacked useful software until desktop publishing matured years after release; the first online services made molasses look fast; both Java and JavaScript were buggy and inconsistent upon release; and HTML 5 is still buggy and inconsistent. And node.JS? I still don't know what the fock that's all about, I hope to finally "get it" before I die, or maybe dying is preferable?
Table-ized A.I.
Most touted "game changing" technologies turn out not to amount to much. Real game changers are rare.
Remember Ethanol fuel cell powered cell phones?
if all the touted "game changers" came true we would be in a SterTrek universe by now.
'Game Changer' considered a 'Toy'.
And occasionally a piece of technology is heralded as a world-changing innovation, and end up just being a toy. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Segway.
My car is a toy. It's a sportscar, and it's fun. It also gets me places, and it also keeps me warm, but what it brings to my transportation over a normal car is unnecessary for transportation. In other words, the more that it offers doesn't make the transportation any better (not faster, not more comfortable, not easier).
Each of those items, and the mouse is an easy example to discuss, was a toy when it came out. At the time, computers were used for typing. What the mouse offered wasn't necessary for computer use. It didn't improve any task being done at the time. That's what made it a toy.
Obviously any toy, once it becomes ubiquitous, becomes flexible as a tool. If everyone had a sportscar like mine, we could redesign the roads to function like the track, and all drive at twice the speed; we could redesign parking lots to fit more cars too.
Agreed, but my desktop (or even the laptop) doesn't fit well into my pocket.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I can just see the senior engineers watching the junior engineers waving their hands in the air with VR goggles on and thinking that it isn't "Real work"
The telescope was actually a toy first.
[Stupid] People Often Deride Game Changing Technology as 'a Toy'
A little less profound that way, but mostly true.
Some of it may be useful, especially energy-related such as closing and opening window blinds, turning off/on heat automatically (even using a weather forecast?). But the rest seems to be crap like a touchscreen mirror that teaches you how to brush teeth, music that follows you around if you have a mansion and no family or friends, a fridge that thinks it's a mainframe or any contraption they can come up with. Will we really need, eventually, a conveyor belt that feeds bread slices to a toaster, then a cartoony white-glove-hand seizes the toasted bread that flies out of the toaster and hand it to a butter-knifing-and-spreading robot?
Will we spend our time to reconfigure the robot to use peanut butter or jam, rather than do the task ourselves?
Now a bread dispenser that cuts a slice for me would be fun I guess. Sliced bread is the worst invention since sliced bread : if you slice real bread beforehand, it will just go stale and hard faster. Also it sucks when you want a thick slice but all the slices available are thin ones.
So, here comes the smart bread slicing machine. It either has a touchscreen, or you pull your smartphone to ask for the desired thickness and number of slices, with options for thickness randomization or custom thickness distributions. Great! Now I can't hurt myself. Although I could hurt myself when doing the cleaning and maintenance of my Bread Slicer 2000, or when it jams. Also I think I should share my bread stats on Facebook. Hey friend, I crumbed you three times today! Why didn't you answer or comment on me?
In the "real" world there are such fine pieces of art as "smart switches" or power bars that turn everything off if you turn the TV off. (Some might even add an inconspicuous killer switch next to a light switch, for guests to press when they're trying to find their keys). So, your set-top box or ISP box gets its power cut while in the middle of writing to disk ; DVR recording is lost, downloads are interrupted, NAS shares are dead and when you turn the thing on you watch the poor thing show a spinner on its VFD screen forever while it fscks the file system.
The music files from iTunes can be accessed by most devices too, only the early ones had DRM on them.
Music videos/TV shows/movies, on the other hand, are another story.
I suppose I'll be saying the same thing again some day...
Well, if you think about it, that's actually quite normal.
Most new disruptive technology are developped quickly, with a lots of iteration and experimentation.
(That comes more or less with the fact that they are trying something new, and iterative and rapid development are more or less a requirement).
Of course that means that the technology will necessarily go through a "minimum delivrable" phase.
It's not complete yet, it only contains the bare minimum to make a viable product.
Then of course, obviously, old guns won't necessarily see the potential. The only see the current state and consider it a toy.
They ARE right, it IS *currently* a toy. But a toy designed to show possibilities.
And thus visionary people will quickly notice all the potential and see beyond the toy. They see what is now possible to achieve with the technology that wasn't possible before.
One man's shiny new toy, is another man's first step to reaching the moon.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
when you lumped Java and Javascript together.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Like how the iPad was going to revolutionize the workplace?
Still a toy
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
- Slashdot Founder
Some tech seems to go through a set of stages: 1. Toy, usually just for the rich. 2. Still a toy, but you don't have to be super-rich any more. 3. A nice thing to have that opens doors. 4. A necessity if you really want to do well. 5. So essential in society that it's somewhat subsidized for those who can't afford it, or even regarded as a basic right.
Consider these 5 basic stages, and ponder this history of: 1. Motorized transportation. 2. Computers. 3. Jet packs. 4. Electric fans. 5. Intravenous fluids.
Please provide at least 10 references. Have your essays on my desk by Wednesday morning.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Interestingly enough, OS/2 was never, never referred to as a toy IIRC. It lacked a GUI until it finally hit version 2 and had multiple other disappointments when considering the hype and technical discussions that preceded each release.
OS/2 had the imprimatur of "serious" all over it. Therefore the fun aspects of a toy, and something else I can't quite find a word for (ambition maybe?), short-circuited the toy label.
Hurt much about Metro Microsoft? Pssst! it wasn't a game changer in the industry and never will be, unless you count the mass exodus of Windows users for Mac OS and Linux a game changer. PS please burn for the crappy forced OS you call an "upgrade", Windows 10.
If anything, when something new comes out there's essentially always a bunch of fanboys hyping the crap out of it, and some smaller group that dismiss it completely. However some thoughts come to mind:
“Java [and JavaScript] programming language is a toy” -- Java is a toy, it's always sucked, the premise has always been a horrible failed idea, and successful marketing pushed it into the most inappropriate applications conceivable (Java on devices with limited resources? holy crap what a horrible idea..). Java single-handedly made the first decade of cellphones suck horribly. The amount of damage java has done is nearly incalculable. Javascript and Java are not related. Though it's fair to say that javascript and web development in general is as screwed an approach to the problem as java is for application development.
“Intranet is a toy” (picture of sharepoint) -- Said no one ever, sharepoint is and always has been a toy yes, but the internet came about in order to connect various intranets.
“SMS [in the US] is a toy” -- No, SMS in the US was a scam, there's a difference
“Flash storage is a toy” -- Uh what? Who said that? Form's of solid state storage have been around forever and have been used in some of the most critical applications.
“Facebook is a toy” -- And what is it now? It's a popular toy, and that makes for big business, but we have known that since geocities.
“Cloud is a toy” -- So a natural evolution of hosted services and collocation created by big datacenter users to better utilize their resources, was considered a toy by someone, that someone had no idea what they were talking about.
Anyway dumb article regardless, but sometimes taking the bait is fun
One of the best contributions the iPhone made was to make using a smart phone seem normal.
Computers are not really necessary in our personal lives for happiness. However now we are forced to use it because 'the neighbor has it'. Mankind has complicated its existence unnecessarily with too much personal tech. Yes, maybe they are needed in industry and science, to help solve global problems of poverty and environment, advance scientific knowledge, etc. To help reach other planets, explore space, etc.
But wasn't your grandpa happy without these gazillion gadgets and online video and music and what not?
At conception.
Ok you don't like the iPhone. But it was a new idea that was transformative. It changed the phone, and the PC industry, by merging them. But at first it just seemed like a super expensive toy. Perfect example.
You say 'Toy' as if it's a bad thing. Toys are awesome. There's nothing quite so childish as wanting to be a grown-up.
You don't seem to have read my post. I do like my iPhone.
My aged father, who's seen his son "play" video games since the late 1970's. Who went to university to study Software Engineering. Who worked on both sides of the Atlantic developing applications and games, still considers games to be for children. This is all while he's on his Android tablet playing games! You can't win!
Actually the Treo worked with web sites better than the original iPhone due to the simpler nature of web sites back in 2003.
Sounds to me like you're the only one with rose tinted glasses on here.
No, it didn't. The issue to overcome wasn't the complexity of the page, it was the automatic re-formatting the Treo and Windows Mobile browsers attempted to do in order to make the page fit on a screen that was barely 300 pixels wide. The iPhone's approach was to render the page into a much larger canvas and to use a combination of scrolling and pinch-to-zoom to navigate, sort of like using a magnifying glass over a large book. The meant that unlike the various Treo phones at the time web pages were rendered in their orignal formatting. The Treo was a joke in comparison.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it did. Page reflow on the Treo worked fine with most sites of the day. You're talking about stuff that you clearly haven't experienced.
The iPhone approach meant that you had to constantly zoom in and out to read a page and again. That's why mobile sites still exist to this day.
And again, the iPhone came out 4 years later. For its time the Treo was much more amazing than the iPhone was for its time.
Yes it did. Page reflow on the Treo worked fine with most sites of the day. You're talking about stuff that you clearly haven't experienced.
Apparently not. Was this on the Palm OS version or the Windows version?
The iPhone approach meant that you had to constantly zoom in and out to read a page and again. That's why mobile sites still exist to this day.
Yep. Oh and by sheer coincidence it's also the approach all the mobile browsers in use today use, mainly because the automatic-reformatting was too spotty.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The big hype around smart watches got us ridiculously expensive gadgets that are not smart without a smart phone which by itself is shockingly dumb without a decent data plan that allows asking servers permanently for what to do. And what do these overpriced gizmos do? Tell time, measure heart beat, and show a notice that you need to pull your phone out of your pocket. Yea, it is great for bragging, like owning a yacht or a souped up Mercedes that shares the garage with a Tesla and a Porsche, but so far there is little to no practical use that would turn a smart watch to have a positive ROI. That makes the difference between a tool and a toy even in consumer space.