Friday, September 16, 2005

Quote of Note: Hossein Eslambolchi: 'To me Skype is like a toy.' [...] The use of the T-word reminded me of then-CEO Bob Allen's 1995 speech almost exactly ten years ago, on September 12, 1995, where he said,'. . . we have all spent a lot of money in trials and experiments trying to force the technology into the minds of the consumers. Until we find applications that are easy to use, affordable, make people's lives easier and prove their bottom line, online services are merely going to be toys. But . . . we are beginning to get it right, and . . . [they] will be a big part of people's lives one day.' (Via isen.blog.) BA and HE confused the technology with particular early instantiations. They did not understand that it's not Skype or AOL, but rather a set of building blocks and design principles that can be used to arrange the building blocks into a huge number of possible combinations, some with much greater potential than the first examples. They assumed that they could measure the threat to their business models by the flaws of those first examples, because they really did not understand that the evolutionary process had just started. I heard similar things from similar sources about how search was going nowhere back in 2000. 8:17:41 AM