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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.
They laughed at Columbus - but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
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
"People Often Deride Game Changing Technology as 'a Toy'"
That is ridiculous. Things that change games are properly classified as "sports equipment".
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.
and some things labelled as game changers turn out to be of little use, some things that are game changers are recognized as such, and some things nobody expects to be a difference maker becomes disruptive.
We need submissions to cover all of these scenarios.
Well, that's not really true. There are already industrial 3D printing machines.
Now as for "tabletop" 3D printing? It is a toy at the moment, but it wouldn't be hard to see how the idea could become something very important under the right circumstances.
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
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.
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.
Nonsense! I've been waiting since the 1950's, but I'll never give up on the dream of the flying car! NEVER!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
-- 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.
"Computer, Earl Grey tea, hot."
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
Brand new technology rarely as well fleshed out as existing technologies, This is the obvious statement news at 11.
It's not that it's "not as well fleshed out". There are lots of things that start out as "not as well fleshed out". It's not about features and power users. It's more that many technologies actually start out as toys. Being a toy is the killer app that allows them to continue to grow until they get a real killer app. Today's CPUs and GPUs would be a lot further behind if they didn't have the cashflow from gamers on the leading edge. If you want to look at current toys that might one day make the switchover look at drones, immersive technology, 3d printing, and the handsfree interfaces of xbox/wii. At their current level they aren't really useful outside of toys but people buying them as toys is what allows money to continue to flow in so that they can improve. The automobile is another such toy that took early adopters to get it off the ground.
Another interesting thought experiment would be what technologies are we missing out on because they are harder to "toyify" and therefore never get the cashflow needed to progress to the next level?
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)
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
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.
Really? Who's definition is that? Does your hammer become a toy if you repair something in your house with it? You should look up the definition for the word "toy". A hobby is not "playing" with something.
It's a Stratasys uPrint Plus. In the specifications page, it says "Layer thickness: .254 mm (.010 in.) or .330 mm (.013 in.)"
It depends. If it takes hours of setup every time you print one item, it's just an unreliable tool, but still not a toy. If it takes hours of setup to properly calibrate once in a while, it's just normal wear and tear. We're talking about fractions of millimetres here.
Of course the quality from higher-end 3D printers will be much better, but so will the cost. If we're talking precision alone, an FDM from Stratasys won't stand a chance against a Polyjet from the same company.
But comparing the output quality of a Stratasys FDM vs a well-calibrated RepRap? You'd be surprised which one you'd pick and the price difference between the two.
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.
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