Transcript of a talk by Marc Andreessen arguing that major technological innovations were commonly dismissed as trivial or jokes when first introduced. He gives three historical examples—the telephone, the Internet, and the automobile—to show early skepticism, and concludes that present innovations will likely be similarly underestimated by contemporaries.
Chapters
In history, if you read history, the great innovations of the past are now well understood as being very, very important. In almost every case, they were not widely understood as such at the time. In fact, I would assert that they were often actually viewed as trivialities or jokes. I don't think that this is a new phenomenon to be this dismissive about new technologies early. Let me give three quick examples. The telephone. When Thomas Edison was first working on the telephone, the assumption of the use case motivating his early work on the telephone was the idea that telegraph operators needed to be able to talk to each other. Right? It was considered so implausible that you would have a system that would let any ordinary person pick up the telephone and talk to another ordinary person. Like that was clearly implausible. That was clearly not going to happen. But you had all these telegraph operators all scattered throughout the world, and you had all these coordination problems between telegraph operators as they sent messages to each other. And they said, boy, if we could actually let the telegraph operators talk to each other, that would make the telegraph work a lot better. Completely missing the larger opportunity. The Internet. I have personal experience with this one. The Internet was laughed at. It was heaped with scorn from 1993 basically, to 1997, 1998, in fact. Those of you who were in the industry at that time will remember the New York Times had a reporter on staff named Peter Lewis. Hopefully he's here in the room. I'm convinced he was specifically hired by the editors to just write negative stories about the Internet. It was like all he did, and it was always, the Internet was never going to be a consumer medium. The Internet is not nearly as big as these people think. Nobody is ever going to trust the Internet for E commerce. It was literally like every week there was a negative story in the Times about the Internet, which causes me a certain amount of pleasure today watching the New York Times company try to cope with the consequences of the technology that they laughed at. I try not to indulge in schadenfreude. Every once in a while it sneaks through. Finally, my final example, the car. So the car was absolutely viewed as a triviality and a toy when it first emerged. In fact, JP Morgan himself refused to invest in Ford Motor Company with the response that it's just a toy for rich people, which is in fact what it was at the time. If you had one of the first cars, you had to be a rich person. You had to have a driver. You often actually had to also have a stoker. With the early cars to keep the engine going. And then you also had to travel with a full time mechanic because the thing would break down every three miles. So there were a lot of reasons to doubt the importance of the car. My favorite example of skepticism about the car. There were a series of laws passed in the late 1800s in the UK and also in the US called the Red Flag laws at the time. So the UK Red Flag law worked as follows. Firstly, at least three persons shall be employed to drive or conduct any automobile, which is actually not that crazy because it was already assumed that you had your driver and your mechanic with you. Secondly, one of such persons, while any automobile is in motion, shall proceed such automobile on foot by not less than 60 yards and shall carry a red flag constantly displayed and shall warn the riders and drivers of horses of the approach of such automobiles and shall signal the driver thereof when it shall be necessary to stop. So possibly a little bit of protectionism on the part of the blacksmith guild, but still a good sign of the times in terms of just the initial shock and initial rejection of the idea. So the point is, the great innovations of the present, I believe, are virtually guaranteed to be viewed as trivial and to be viewed as jokes. I think history 50, 100 years from now will enshroud them in legendary in our time, they won't be recognized as such, of course. In the future, when they become legends, our descendants will themselves have their own trivial innovations to laugh at.
