alt Hacker NewsSome of this may have been a reaction to the era of Javascript framework churn. There were way too many different technologies for doing roughly the same job. They all more or less worked.
On the other hand, IBM was late getting into integrated circuits. They had Solid Logic Technology, automated machinery for putting transistors into ceramic substrates to make tiny but discrete circuits. That's what powered the IBM System/360. Worked, but kept mainframe prices high and made IBM late to minicomputers.
Innovation when the problem is hard is more interesting. Look at the history of US long range bombers. The B-29 was effective, but underpowered, and had a lot of trouble getting off the ground fully loaded. So, after WWII, the next development was the B-36, which answered the question "what if we scaled up the B-29?"[1] Six propellers, and four jet engines (added late in the design cycle). Was a sky barge, but it worked, as long as no one was trying hard to shoot it down. No flyable aircraft remain. That was the boring technology approach.
After that came the B-47, which answered the question "what if we scaled up a jet fighter to bomber size?"[2] The B-47 was all jets, no props. It needed solid-fuel rocket boosters (!) to help it get off the ground, and a drag chute to slow it down on landing. It was terrible to fly; its operating speed and altitude were too near the "coffin corner" where stall and Mach buffet meet.[3] No flyable aircraft remain.
Then came the B-52. New engines. New airframe. New design. [4] That's the high-risk approach. It worked. Hundreds are still in active service. Outlasted most of its successors, the B-58 Hustler (a supersonic intercontinental bomber), the B-70, the F-111, etc.
On the commercial side, we have Boeing, whose most successful airliner is a variant of the B-737, which first flew in 1967. But that's another story.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKQYG_fA2uM
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1-urTRxeEM
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_%28aerodynamics%...
Replies
IBM briefly pulled ahead with the PC though, mainly by routing around their own bureaucracy. That was a hard innovation problem, especially without a crystal ball.
I think there's the problem of pretending to be something that one is not - when people have always tried to associate themselves and the things they did with the cool 'in-group' of genuinely inspiring people, to the point where the fakery was in your face - think of companies meaninglessly cramming 'AI' or 'crypto' into their products.
The example I used is incredibly clear-cut, and is the subject of ridicule, but when the boundaries blurrier, people have managed to get away with this sleight of hand.
The point I want to make: the technologist who designs next-gen semiconductor processes or planes that fly faster and further, is categorically, qualitatively different from the one who writes code for ecommerce websites.
No points for guessing which group has lobbied successfully for erasing this distinction.
This is a civilizational issue. Despite allegedly a group of technocrats being charge of society, who do everything in the name of progress, there has been very little progress outside the field of AI during the past decade.
And this was true even a decade ago - this article argues against progress in software engineering - saying all new stuff is useless, and for the record they turned out to be mostly right, all new stuff did turn out to be meh. Curiously, it names node as one of the hot new things of his era - though it's exactly the opposite, node succeeded, because it managed to transplant the validated engineering and mindshare of js devs to the backend and other domains, so even when new, it chose the niche of 'boring' tech.