I think this flows directly into why it seems intuitive that new ideas are getting harder to find. For example, all the obvious ideas in mobile apps were explored as businesses from 2005~2015, and it’s hard to think of a genuinely new mobile app concept that isn’t just a variation on an established business.
If you were trying to, say, disrupt the taxi industry using computer technology in 1998, you would run into a big lack of infrastructure. Would people request a taxi from a website? Then people couldn’t request a taxi without visiting a place such as a PC cafe. There would be no way to process payments. There would be no way to track drivers using GPS—which did exist, but there were no internet-connected wireless GPS devices. In fact, how would you communicate with the drivers? By cell phone? Would you hire human dispatchers? What’s the value add on top of phone-dispatched taxis then?
Clearly, there was a right time to start a computer-enhanced taxi service, and that time was 2005~2015. By 2015, the idea had been had.
Yes, I agree. But note that new breakthrough technologies open up whole new fields of ideas that are suddenly “easy to find”—as per your very example. So another way to look at the question is what affects the rate of growth in new fields.
I think this flows directly into why it seems intuitive that new ideas are getting harder to find. For example, all the obvious ideas in mobile apps were explored as businesses from 2005~2015, and it’s hard to think of a genuinely new mobile app concept that isn’t just a variation on an established business.
If you were trying to, say, disrupt the taxi industry using computer technology in 1998, you would run into a big lack of infrastructure. Would people request a taxi from a website? Then people couldn’t request a taxi without visiting a place such as a PC cafe. There would be no way to process payments. There would be no way to track drivers using GPS—which did exist, but there were no internet-connected wireless GPS devices. In fact, how would you communicate with the drivers? By cell phone? Would you hire human dispatchers? What’s the value add on top of phone-dispatched taxis then?
Clearly, there was a right time to start a computer-enhanced taxi service, and that time was 2005~2015. By 2015, the idea had been had.
Yes, I agree. But note that new breakthrough technologies open up whole new fields of ideas that are suddenly “easy to find”—as per your very example. So another way to look at the question is what affects the rate of growth in new fields.