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At 09:48 PM 3/19/2002 +0000, Bill de hÓra wrote:
>Maybe there are no clear reasons why certain technologies matter.
>Credit to Tim Bray for pointing out that some predictors don't seem
>to matter, but I don't think he goes anywhere far enough. I suspect
>that the adoption of technology largely follows a series of frozen
>accidents: you might as well be predicting earthquakes as the next
>big thing.
It's fun to try to figure out what successes have in common, and I think it
can even be instructive. I learned a lot from The Mythical Man Month, for
instance.
But breakthrough technologies tend to be a bit of a surprise, and hard to
evaluate at first. If they were easy to evaluate, they wouldn't be
revolutionary.
It's 1905. Someone gives you the following paper to read:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/
Does this paper matter? Will people still be talking about it in 10 years?
What are the indications?
Jonathan
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