[NitpickLawyer]

> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

The Internet begs to differ. AI is more akin to the Internet than to any Mac product. We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve. And this stage of AI is also very very close to the consumer. What took dedicated teams of specialised ML engineers to trial ~5-10 years ago, can be achieved by domain experts / plain users, today.

[monooso]

> We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve.

We've always had that.

In olden times the companies who peddled such solutions were called "a business without a market", or simply "a failing business." These days they're "pre-revenue."

Maybe it will be different this time, maybe it will be exactly the same but a lot more expensive. Time will tell.

[latexr]

I think you’re missing the point. Of course you can make such a product. As Steve says right after, he himself made that mistake a lot. The point is that to make something great (at several levels of great, not just “makes money”) you have to start with the need and build a solution, not have a solution and shoehorn it to a need.

The internet is an entirely different beast and does not at all support your point. What we have on the web is hacks on top of hacks. It was not built to do all the things we push it to do, and if you understand where to look, it shows.

[ViktorRay]

Are you sure the internet begs to differ?

The dot com bubble crashed. Many websites like pets.com ended up closing up.

It wouldn’t be until much later that those ideas succeeded…when companies were able to work from the customer experience backward to the technology.