> (e.g. electric cars were invented in the 19th century and are only now becoming popular)
I hate this example, and it's like one of the most common ones on HN.
As said by thousands of people and many documentaries before me , the electric car had numerous real conspiracies working against it, some of which were the most powerful financial groups in the world.[0]
The 'electric car' wasn't made popular and possible by recent technological strides -- although it was made better.
The success and popularity of the electric vehicle was made possible by financial shifts away from petroleum exploration, facilitated by dwindling profits and increased scarcity of oil, and encouraged by a movement towards sustainability both from the social culture of the world and the various actions of government from country to country.
Yes, range has improved. Yes, the cars are more intelligent and better to drive -- but these improvements have been seen across the automotive industry since its' inception with ICE based vehicles included.
The real motivating factor behind the electric car is the environment that now exists that allows such endeavors to be profitable -- an environment that not only includes technological improvements like you hint towards, but more importantly it's an environment that fosters development of such things due to the existence of a profit incentive and increased governmental-body cooperation.
All that said, unless Cisco is even more evil than I realized (woah..), I have a hard time presuming that video conferencing has been held back by the same sort of conspiratorial under-handed back-office dealings that slowed the progress of EV adoption.
Why does it matter which circumstances allowed the electric car to become popular only now? Whether that's because of major industry and consumer shifts, or because the technology matured enough for mass market, they have the same effect. It's certainly a combination of both, and we shouldn't downplay the advances in battery technology alone.
I mentioned that example because the previous two comments were dismissing this attempt at 3D teleconferencing on the grounds of it being old technology with past failures. But I think we agree that it takes a certain industry environment along with a technical leap to make a technology truly popular. Even if that never ends up happening in this case and it remains a niche product, we should applaud the technical merits here instead of being dismissive.
For that matter video teleconferencing period has only just really hit critical mass even though there were videophones at the NY World's Fair in the 1960s and camera systems have been around in conference rooms for a few decades.
What really happened was that it became more or less accessible to anyone with a laptop and an even marginal network connection for basically no cost. And, oif course, the last 18 months really pushed it over the finish line if it wasn't already.
Exactly. Video calls have become successful because remote work has become successful. The goal was not to make video calls. The goal was to further improve a team that was already remote. And I think you're right that the low/no cost hardware for most adopters has been key. Which I think is further proof that the demand is really pretty modest. I was just on a work meeting where half the people had their cameras off, and where I often didn't have the Zoom window on top because the video was very much secondary to what they were saying.
I hate this example, and it's like one of the most common ones on HN.
As said by thousands of people and many documentaries before me , the electric car had numerous real conspiracies working against it, some of which were the most powerful financial groups in the world.[0]
The 'electric car' wasn't made popular and possible by recent technological strides -- although it was made better.
The success and popularity of the electric vehicle was made possible by financial shifts away from petroleum exploration, facilitated by dwindling profits and increased scarcity of oil, and encouraged by a movement towards sustainability both from the social culture of the world and the various actions of government from country to country.
Yes, range has improved. Yes, the cars are more intelligent and better to drive -- but these improvements have been seen across the automotive industry since its' inception with ICE based vehicles included.
The real motivating factor behind the electric car is the environment that now exists that allows such endeavors to be profitable -- an environment that not only includes technological improvements like you hint towards, but more importantly it's an environment that fosters development of such things due to the existence of a profit incentive and increased governmental-body cooperation.
All that said, unless Cisco is even more evil than I realized (woah..), I have a hard time presuming that video conferencing has been held back by the same sort of conspiratorial under-handed back-office dealings that slowed the progress of EV adoption.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F