Forwarded: Doing Old Things Better Vs. Doing Brand New Things - Andreessen Horowitz
How can a new technology make the most impact on the world?
- Should the focus be on improving existing products/strategies?
- Should the priority instead be to explore new possibilities of working on things that were previously not even conceivable?
Usually when a new technological breakthrough happens, it is easier to let the excitement make us focus too much on the minutae - immediate, perceptible gains . However, its is all the more important to take a step back and try to figure out the biggger picture. In the article, Horowitz suggests that non-linear (exponential) payoffs come from imagining and building things around the new “native” ideas inherently introduced by the technology itself.
For example: Internet in 1990s was primarily used for ecommerce and the solving problems that it was expected to solve. However, the 2000s brought about new products that explored the unknown domains of social media, cryptocurrency, blogging, podcasting and video content as the cost of content distribution decreased substantially.
In the last few years, fields such as virtual reality and cryptocurrencies have caught a lot of imagination and I’m very excited to see what kind of products can be built around this tech even though it might take a decade or more to fully play out and become the new “normal”.
Another example in this category of technologies would be Apple M1 chip. I just wonder about the possibilities for the entire Apple Ecosystem with this new processor.
Exciting!