[xitrium]

This did not hold up well, imo. Not sure how to count it but by some lists this is stuff like: Tencent, Alibaba, Amazon, Netflix, Priceline, Baidu, Salesforce.com, JD.com.

Others would include Uber/Lyft, Airbnb, GitHub, ...

There are only a few that would qualify that I can think of - Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.

If folks here have other examples or thoughts on why this does or doesn't hold true would love to hear them.

[cpmsmith]

I think the "Thing" in Next Big Thing as this article uses it is rarely a business, more often a technology. WhatsApp has never been considered a toy, but IM as a medium has—WhatsApp's genesis as a valuable business is itself that toy becoming a Big Thing. Netflix was never a toy; streaming video was a toy in 2005, Netflix turned it into a billion dollar business.

Edit: Technology, not product, and Netflix example

[nostrademons]

Could just be where we are in the technology cycle. Using Carlota Perez terminology, in 2010 we were in the midst of Synergy for web technology and Frenzy for mobile. Now both web & mobile are nearing Maturity and whatever the next big technology cycle is still in Irruption.

If you looked at PCs from 1993-2003 you would've had a similar view. PCs from 1983-1993 underwent dramatic progress: you went from 16-color TV outputs, 64K of RAM, 8-bit CPUs, floppies, command-line interfaces, and BASIC to 24-bit color, 3D computer graphics, GUIs, 16MB of RAM, 200+ MB hard disks, 32-bit CPUs, IDEs, desktop publishing, CD-ROMs, modems and Internet access, even speech recognition and text-to-speech on some Apple machines. From 1993-2003, you had incremental progress: Microsoft won, Windows 3.1 became Win95 and then eventually Win2k, CPUs got faster, RAM and disks expanded, broadband happened, but what we used the computer for didn't change much, except for the advent of the Internet. The Internet itself was supposed to revolutionize computing, but the dot-com bust happened in 2001 and in 2003 it was still pretty much a toy. And other much-hyped developments like WebTV, VR, voice recognition, and AI had fallen flat.

There are plenty of toys that are still in Irruption now. Cryptocurrency was supposed to change the world; the bubble burst in 2018, but maybe we'll see it come back in 2020 with DeFi the way the Internet did in 2005 with social media. Drones are literal toys right now. So is VR & AR. There's been a lot of progress in computing for kids with things like Scratch, RoBlox, or Minecraft.

[alasdair_]

I can see curren-gen VR and AR games leading to next-gen "real AR" glasses with an impact on far more than just gaming.

[vardump]

Most VR/AR development activity I've seen seems to be about (industrial) training.

[HeWhoLurksLate]

Where it would be most definitely not a toy after a few iterations.

[dahdum]

I see AR as having an enormous future impact, games only a small fraction of that. We jumped at the chance to escape reality into our phones, but AR is far more seductive. VR limits your mobility, but AR can be used every waking hour.

I see it starting with small tweaks to reality...a dingy concrete sidewalk replaced with a golden brick road. Empty walls in an apartment awash with art, scenic views, and/or entertainment.

[TACIXAT]

I look forward to my golden brick road speckled with syringes and human feces.

[ronilan]

It didn’t hold up because, while it does sound catchy and nice, the assertion is wrong.

And it’s wrong not because of the “toy” part but because of the “next big thing” part.

There is absolutely no guarantee of a ”next”, a ”big” or “a thing“ coming, regardless of origin.

A different future is not inevitable, at best it’s a toss up. This last decade went for inertia. Next one? Who knows...

[kgraves]

Evan Speigel admittedly said this about Snapchat [0] (2014):

"When we first started working on Snapchat in 2011, it was just a toy. In many ways it still is – but to quote [Charles] Eames, 'Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas.' "

[0] https://www.snap.com/en-GB/news/post/2014-axs-partner-summit...

[DoreenMichele]

Cars started out as ridiculous luxury toys for rich people.

Sometimes you gotta wait a few decades to see where things go.

[pbhjpbhj]

That doesn't appear to be true, Duryea and Benz vehicles (ICE burning petrol/gasoline in the late 1800s) appear to have replaced bicycles and horse-drawn carriages and acted as functional means of transportation, rather than "toys".

Earlier electric and hydrogen powered vehicles I've seen appear similarly to have been created as functional replacements for horse-drawn vehicles.

Maybe you could expand your comment to demonstrate your point?

[mikestew]

I don't know about horse-drawn carriages, but bicycles of the late 1800s were luxuries for, well, not rich people but certainly for the well-to-do. It's one of the reasons that child-sized highwheel bicycles are rare: they were ridiculously expensive, and most certainly not a child's toy. And they did arguably serve a utilitarian purpose; at least a bicycle doesn't eat if you don't ride it. But how were bicycles, specifically highwheelers, portrayed by the press of the day? As ridiculous toys for wealthy people. Source: grew up around antique bicycle collectors, and have an 1886 Columbia Standard myself.

I remain unconvinced, however, that an early ICE-powered automobile was nothing but a temperamental toy that the owner really, really wanted to be practical. I've hung around with enough people with Ford Model Ts (my parents also had a Ford A for a while) to suspect that something built twenty years prior to the Ford T had to be laughably unreliable. Because I only rely on a T to get me to work if my boss were pretty laid back. :-)

[jacobr1]

There were steam-powered cars in the late 1700s that were toys of a few wealthy patrons ...

[DoreenMichele]

https://www.leaderherald.com/news/local-news/2019/07/when-au...

https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/toys-rich

[pbhjpbhj]

Your first link is blocked for me by the website owner.

The second in turn links to https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/climate-change-will-push-ca... . When they say "cars are an expensive toy for the rich" they're saying figuratively that cars aren't reliable nor efficient. I don't think anyone would disagree that [important, useful] new technologies tend to get cheaper and more efficient over time.

It's really not clear, if this is the sort of backing to the "toy" claim what it is hoped to prove?

The early users appeared to use cars for transportation, which the second link doesn't contradict, so not literal toys. The "toy" claim is just a perjorative that the link appears, implicitly, to say was used by those who were already profiting from horse related industry.

[DoreenMichele]

From the first piece:

The oft-printed statement that early automobiles were ‘playthings of the rich’ until Henry Ford’s super-cheap Model T started rolling off the assembly line in October 1908, is easily proven by scanning the makes of high-priced chariots and their wealthy owners who participated in the Amsterdam Evening Recorder’s Saturday, July 10, 1909 “Sociability Run” from Amsterdam to Lake Luzerne.

Everything I've ever seen indicates cars were considered to be "toys" for the rich when they first came out. Roads were not really designed for them. They were insanely expensive. They were not generally considered to be serious new tech that would eventually compete as transportation.

That changed when Henry Ford made cars affordable for the masses.

Old laws often said things like "You must have someone walk in front of your car ringing a bell so you don't spook the horses." This implicitly tells you that early cars were also extremely slow and horses were the form of serious transportation that the culture revolved around.

[dredmorbius]

Even more so when post-WWII cheap petrol made cars affordable, and suburban living made them essential.

Half of all households (based on ~4 persons per household) didn't own an automobile until between 1945-1950. Ownership didn't cross the 10% threshold until the 1930s.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cy898/durin...

[dredmorbius]

https://web.archive.org/web/20190722171109/https://www.leade...

Internet Archive mirror, should be accessible.

[DoreenMichele]

For clarity, that's a mirror of the first link I posted.

[perl4ever]

"The early users appeared to use cars for transportation, which the second link doesn't contradict, so not literal toys."

I think when people say they were toys, they mean that in the same sense that a Spyker or Ariel Atom are "toys" today.

[l_t]

I think the "looking like a toy" terminology is confusing the discussion.

From the article:

> Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs.

So instead of asking if it "looks like a toy", what if we asked, which of those products started out by "undershooting" user's needs?

In that lens, I think you could make arguments for a few of those having started by "undershooting." The most obvious example to me is Amazon starting out as an online bookstore.

edit: I just want to add that from my vantage point this might be a true idea, but it gives very little actionable information. Perhaps Christensen's books give better insight on why this is something we should care about.

[charlesju]

Scooters, Bitcoin, Tinder, Meditation Apps. Then literal toys like Fortnite, Pokemon Go.

[hndamien]

Would you call Bitcoin a "toy"? If so, it really is just saying that it is likely to be something you are initially dismissive of.

[mch82]

World of Warcraft Gold & similar in-game currencies are toys.

Bitcoin is not a toy, but follows in the footsteps of those toys (in addition to traditional currencies).

[CryptoPunk]

Bitcoin started off as a toy, with 10,000 being exchanged for a pizza once. Ethereum smart contracts, even ones dealing with cryto-asset-exchange, are often treated as toys

[airocker]

Uber/Lyft/AirBnb were considered toys when they began. It may be that nowadays the transition from toy to big company is faster.

[playpause]

I don't remember anyone saying Uber/Lyft/Airbnb were toys when they began. Some might have thought them unlikely to succeed, but that's not the same thing as being a toy.

[airocker]

I do not think we are referring to Toy's literal meaning here. IMO, Toy here means something insignificant that a few people/small market uses.

[Impossible]

Exactly. Those of you that are hung up on toy meaning a literal toy or video game with no intrinsic value can replace the word toy with "gimmick" or "novelty" or even "a serious idea that won't scale" (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html).

Early Air Bed and Breakfast charging people for couch surfing and selling Obama O's (https://www.airbnb.com/obamaos) to fund their startup definitely feels toy like to me.

I'd argue there are entire categories that are currently considered toys, but eventually with the right business model, tech improvements and cultural changes will make the serious billion dollar tech companies we have now look like toys.

[basch]

Toy vs Tool means novelty vs efficiency creator. A toy is fun to use it exists to be used for pleasure, a tool is useful and exists to make work easier. Toy should be used to mean superfluous bonus, unnecessary but enjoyable pastime.