| HN Mirror

Middle brow dismissals matter. Insight is the result of accurate thought, if someone makes basic errors then they're unlikely to have any worthwhile insights. Consequently, people seem unlikely to hit on anything that's going to give them an advantage by semi-randomly walking through articles and thinking really hard about what the writter might mean. There's charitable interpretation and then there's just grasping at straws.

Take the article in OP for instance. I've no more idea after having read the thing about how to see what people will want in five years than I had before I read the thing.

'Building a great company is about predicting the future. You build something people want now and predict they'll continue to want it in the future.

Just think, if you live in the future, what does it look like? When you see it, that's what you should build.'

Well, gee, that's really useful advice.

Can you actually imagine reasoning that way?

"I think we should do this because in the future everyone will definitely want it."

"Why do you think that? ---"

"Because, uhm."

And then, at best, you just have the list of reasons that people use to select their ideas anyway, pain points and the like, predictions about how the marketplace will change and technology advance. At which point you're not using the supposed insight from the article to, 'Just think, if you live in the future, what does it look like? When you see it, that's what you should build.' you're just doing what you'd normally do under a different heading. You can drop the words 'in the future' from that entirely and you've got a run of the mill way of inventing things. The whole 'in the future' stuff hasn't added any information for you.

'Seeing the future,' by itself, is a terrible way to generate ideas anyway, even if you put that aside. The more obvious they are, 'X will definitely be part of the future,' the less probable it is that having the idea gives you an advantage. The less obvious they are, the less likely it is that you're going to see them and so the less effort it makes sense to sink into trying to do so - (indeed it becomes dramatically less likely that the thing you imagine will be in the future at all, so you're not so much seeing the future as day-dreaming.)

You need something where you have an information or thinking advantage, a way of predicting what your customers are likely to optimise along - a pain point, some sort of cost reduction, etc - knowledge about the world and human nature in other words. Otherwise you're just pulling stuff out of thin air. Which is a terrible business strategy and not even what the people in his examples did:

Job's support of no file system was based on itteration and the knowledge of the use of finder as compared to more traditional interfaces with the file system.

Dropbox was made to address the personal needs of the creator who kept forgetting his USB device.

Tesla's a very old idea at this point. People have been trying to use electricity and other forms of energy storage to address their transport pain for decades.

Microsoft was founded as a software company in a market where people were already making the same kind of programs - their first OS was a version of Unix for God's sake (Xenix).

Oh yeah, and there's Segway, which you know - still hasn't achieved any sort of dominance, so why that's even on that list.

It's just really poor advice that not even the people he seems to site have followed. They didn't see the future and build it, they saw a current problem or an opportunity and went for it.

So, yeah. Personally, I've found that articles that are so dismissed, even on close examination, rarely if ever benefit me in any way for having read them. You can generate a sort of fake wisdom from them, say something that seems profound, but I suspect that's more a function of our love for complex language than it is the underlying thought actually being insightful.