[indeedmug]

The biggest lesson I took away from all of these hype cycles is how unpredictable they are in their arc. Some trends like AV seem like they were going to take over the world, but they died down as quickly as they rose when we realize how hard safety is.

VR seem like it was dead with Google Glasses and Meta. But recent releases show that the [vision of VR is more real than I thought](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg). Apple releasing their VR definitely provides more legitimacy to the idea.

Technology is always hard to actually implement in the real world. I think have expectations that the world would flip over with new innovations in a matter of months. But it actually takes years of hard work to get people to adopt it. The internet and mobile phones are good examples where the promise was clear but the journey being universally adopted was not easy. *

* For the internet, you have the massive struggle of web standards, getting implementations web browser to align, and achieving acceptable performance. Internet Explorer still haunts the dreams of many web devs. It's remarkable how many fully featured web apps there are like Onshape and Google Maps.

* For mobile phones, they require a massive amount of technology investment and unit economics to get the price cheap enough for normal people. It's amazing how wireless technology gotten to the point where we can stream videos on phones.

[opportune]

I think the time to value between the Internet’s hype cycle and real utility was relatively short compared to most other technology hype cycles, because it was like the OG computer hype cycle and so was naturally a bit more delayed than subsequent hype cycles that had as their rationale “better not miss out in case this as big as the Internet”. It only took about 5-10 years to go from the beginning of the bubble to the modern incarnation of the internet and early versions of the products that now underpin trillion dollar businesses.

But, a lot of internet standards had been in the works for a long time at that point. Not so for AV and VR. I think we’re looking at 2+ decades for a lot of technology like that. It’s such a long time it really shakes out the hypemen with short attention spans.