Overhyped Innovations (was Re: OS's In ROM's (was: Re: Mac Classic prob (was Macintoshes..

From: Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com>
Date: Sat Jun 27 17:01:53 1998

On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Sam Ismail wrote:

> Its not what you missed, its what you included!

Another believer!

> Voice recognition?? This is still evolving and has just become viable in
> the last year or so. It works in a more than limited fashion, and is only
> a few years away from being contrinuous without putting limitations on
> how the speaker talks. Current state-of-the-art is speaker independent
> with word dictionaries in the thousands to tens-of-thousands range. Right
> now I'd say it is pretty much a reality. Check out the computer telephony
> stuff.

Promise: revolutionize human-machine interaction. Delivered: telephony
niche that allows you to speak rather than press "one". Your vision of
the future: everybody is walking around mumbling into their collars (I see
a lot of people doing this now in Berkeley, but they don't look like
researchers).

I find this stuff very interesting, and that's why I collect it (Kurzweil
was one of my heros when I was in school), but the common thread of all of
this stuff is that they were so cool that they'd blind you with optimism.

> Wireless networks exist today. Robots are in use in many applications in
> many different fields. MSX was a standard that was around for a time in
> Europe and Japan. Thankfully it didn't catch on in the U.S. or stick
> around, but like CP/M it kinda faded. Home automation is an evolving art
> as well. Voice activated home automation is here, but the good stuff is
> still around the corner.

You won't find anybody more wireless (less wired?) than me, but this stuff
has not displaced wires by any means. I'm a huge fan of robots, but
they've been supposed to vacuum my floor for me since the 60's. MSX was
part of Microsoft's grand plan to displace Nintendo, and never came close
to doing that anywhere. My house has got X-10 stuff everywhere, but it's
a toy.

Some of these things were just illconceived, and the ones that were good
ideas failed because they weren't (and for the most part, will never be)
cost effective.

Some other lesser boondoggles (that I don't collect): CASE tools, hardware
MPEG decoders, MMX, provably-correct programming, ergonomic keyboards,
paperless office.

-- Doug
Received on Sat Jun 27 1998 - 17:01:53 BST