[mattlutze]

There's new ways today to interact with digital media than in the 80's and 90's, and it's a little short-sighted to say "some smart people tried it a while ago so leave it alone."

Deep learning was a cool but impractical idea in the 80's and 90's. In-browser payments were laughed out of the room when Netscape and Microsoft tried proposing them to banks and credit card firms in the 90's.

Part of what the author is saying is that, maybe with our current toolset, we can find that the "simpler" interactions are more physical and interactive now than tapping and clicking.

Sometimes people actually are asking questions like "Who has meetings right now? Which rooms can I bump people from? Did half my group go somewhere that I should be joining?" and a list in Outlook doesn't always fit the bill. Sometimes I need to know where activity is in a building, and just giving me a list of zones or spaces in the building is indeed simpler, but less contextual than, for example, seeing a map with avatars.

There's something good about making what's old new again. It does happen that things we've decided are out of reach or impractical have a novel solution waiting in current capabilities.

[coldtea]

>There's new ways today to interact with digital media than in the 80's and 90's, and it's a little short-sighted to say "some smart people tried it a while ago so leave it alone."

It's the core idea that is bad, so the passage of time won't really change much...

We might built real-world like 3D-UIs to view with Oculus-style goggles, but 3D UIs in the 2D monitor / desktop (outside of gaming and modeling) has been proven a bad idea time and again.