Is it not the case that having access to a machine capable of running either Minecraft or Linux in the early days of each (if not now) means you are (or were) fairly affluent?
I think they meant hardware. For software, yes there are tons of examples (open source software is usually free, games are usually cheap).
But for hardware, it's almost always some expensive thing first. The internet was once very expensive to access, cell phones were initially very expensive, DVD players were initially very expensive, computers in general, etc.
I think Minecraft and Linux are more like the content produced on top of the technology that is computers. It's like if a new book is written it's quickly available to everyone in the market who can afford a book. The book isn't really technology, but the printing, publishing, and distribution is and it's been around long enough to be distributed.
Software seems less like technology and more like writing. The distribution cost, once the systems are in place, is marginal. The technology part is creating the systems that enable the software.
Penicillin. But then, he wasn't trying to make money off of it.
And basically anything Nintendo pushes as a console gimmick. It's not that the tech immediately goes from research to broadly accessible, but rather that they tend to take old tech that no one saw as having profitable consumer applications and find one for it. In that way, as far as consumers are concerned, it goes from unknown to widely-used without making a stopover in early-adapter purgatory.
This may be a little unfair, but I do wonder if there isn't a tendency to consider a technology to be widely available when it becomes available to you and the folks farther back in the line don't count or aren't relevant.
wizzwizz4|4 years ago
dpratt71|4 years ago
TulliusCicero|4 years ago
But for hardware, it's almost always some expensive thing first. The internet was once very expensive to access, cell phones were initially very expensive, DVD players were initially very expensive, computers in general, etc.
ALittleLight|4 years ago
Software seems less like technology and more like writing. The distribution cost, once the systems are in place, is marginal. The technology part is creating the systems that enable the software.
robertlagrant|4 years ago
bsanr2|4 years ago
And basically anything Nintendo pushes as a console gimmick. It's not that the tech immediately goes from research to broadly accessible, but rather that they tend to take old tech that no one saw as having profitable consumer applications and find one for it. In that way, as far as consumers are concerned, it goes from unknown to widely-used without making a stopover in early-adapter purgatory.
dpratt71|4 years ago
And I see that Nintendo has apparently sold an extremely impressive number of consoles (https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/11/nintendo_has_now_s...). But even if everyone only bought one console each, that's only about 10% of world population.
This may be a little unfair, but I do wonder if there isn't a tendency to consider a technology to be widely available when it becomes available to you and the folks farther back in the line don't count or aren't relevant.
encryptluks2|4 years ago
varispeed|4 years ago