| > dinosaur egg – make a search engine that all the hackers use. (top 10,000). don’t worry about doing something constraining in the short term, because if you don’t succeed in the short term there won’t be a long term Umm, search is just fine thank you. I could not survive without Google currently. The only thing I don't like about them is the lack of good customer support and the way they tend to develop unintuitive things with poor documentation (appengine was hard as hell to develop to, Android is getting better, but still they don't have a Rails-style "get up to speed" doc- they have a long way to go) But search is not their problem or mine. > 2. replace email > inbox is a todo list. No, it isn't. It's a method of asynchronous communication and file transfer. If you're using it as a TODO list, you're doing it wrong. > powerful people are in pain because of email. that’s an opportunity. B.S. Email has survived Facebook, Twitter, Google Wave (cough)... > whatever you build, make it fast. gmail has become painfully slow. Maybe on a Pentium III. It isn't slow for me though. > 3. replace universities Good idea, but won't happen. The problem is any business/institution that gets continuous revenue without having to be accountable. Universities suck because they don't have to provide what they are needed for, they only have to compete with each other. The service the universities should provide is the preparation of its students for the betterment of the world. However, what this means is debatable, and the hippies of the 60s that grew up in an environment where they didn't have to work their asses off (like the teenagers of the depression era) are the ones teaching our kids how to feel better about themselves by building a hut in a 3rd world country. > 4. kill hollywood The studios are the only ones that really know how to produce. Music, T.V. and movies are all about production. The YouTube era won't last forever. It is only a matter of time before they get a full handle on things again. > 5. a new apple Apple is still on top of the consumer market. Solve problems that need solving in the way you feel is best. Don't work hard to be something else. Apple didn't. > 6. bring back the old moore’s law >...it would be great if a startup could make a lot of cpus look to the developer like 1 cpu. As an analogy, why don't we make Ruby look like 8086 programming? Parallel computing is different- you can't solve problems with the same mentality. |
That means most business users of e-mail are doing it wrong. Take a sample of heavy e-mail users (managers, sales people, marketing, etc.) and ten out of ten will tell you that they're inundated by e-mail, and that it is a defacto todo list. E-mail is a giant problem for everyone who needs to communicate with a large number of people professionally, and "you're doing it wrong" is not the answer. Using e-mail as a todo list is the path of least resistance, so it's the only viable option for most people right now, and it sucks. It needs to (and will) get fixed.
In general, it's easy to go through any list of ideas and dismiss them. All of these ideas seem sensible to me. They're vague by design, many of them will likely take a very different shape, but it's a good list of general directions to explore.
TL;DR don't be a cynic, be a builder.