Finally, it looks and feels a bit like Spring has arrived with the temperature hitting a balmy 13C, which is T-shirt weather for me. I tend to underdress for the weather in comparison to Finns, which means that warm weather seems even warmer when it arrives, and I always have something warmer to wear when it is cold - my wife tends to dress for every season as if we are living with permafrost.
It is nice to see stuff growing though and the trees are fast filling with greenery, after looking apocalyptic for the last 6 months. Growth stimulates growth and while nature is burning a massive amount of energy to do its thing, a lot of that energy tends to splash and distribute into other areas to drive more growth.
I think this is also the way ideas and innovation works and why at least partially, "there is no original thought" rings true, as there is always a source, a catalyst of thought itself, inspiration. What that inspiration is that instigates motivation to act might be from unexpected sources and the randomness of the world, which is why anything that stifles or punishes growth or discourages attempts, is going to limit how far innovation can be taken.
Just because an idea doesn't work well, doesn't mean that it can't inspire the development of something that does and perhaps, the failure of attempts could be an even stronger driver of improvements in the future. When one group builds something it can inspire competition, when they build something that doesn't hit the mark as a quality solution, there is a gap in the market for innovation.
Companies like Coke and Pepsi develop useless products that no one buys like "caffeine free, diet Coke" (brown water) just to make sure that they aren't leaving a crack in the marketplace for a competitor. Redbull slipped through one of those missed cracks and built a very successful business.
Perhaps what Hive should be doing is encouraging development and then, fast redevelopment of applications and services so as to quickly reiterate solutions. One of the benefits of a the Hive experience is that the community can very quickly be employed to battle test versions, but if the community destroys the development path, new versions won't be created. We talk about wanting more developers, but then punish them when they develop what we don't want, rather than helping them develop what we do - it seems contradictory.
At the end of the day, the applications that get used are the winners for the ecosystem - aren't they? Sure, they might not be to everyone's cup of tea for all kinds of reasons, but if the marketplace says that they should survive, shouldn't they at least get a chance to build and innovate once user feedback starts coming in?
Ideas grow new ideas, development grows new development, criticism grows new criticism. Perhaps at some point, we have to start seeing Hive as the immature industry it is and try to encourage development and growth of the ecosystem, even if it isn't quite what we want, as potentially, it will inspire those among us to build something better, something that does satisfy our needs now and in the future.
Most companies don't open their development up to the public and rather test it internally first, but on Hive, most developments are relatively transparent, especially the ones that don't have financial backing. If Hive was a company, these low-range developments would be nurtured to see if they could grow into a product offering, or reimagined to be utilized in an existing range - on Hive - they are too often killed - and in a small community with very limited resources, that is likely to discourage secondary attempts or others to give it a go themselves, bringing the decentralized process of development to a grinding halt and leaving it all in the hands of a few who do get supported, no matter what they offer.
The possibility to be a decentralized Cola company that is able to continually build new niche products to fill the internet is high and the rewards that come from that flow to a far greater range of people through many channels. Most of these built experiences will fail to gain traction through users, but even some of these will inspire new iterations to be developed that might be very successful, especially once more users are familiar with what blockchain and crypto is.
A lot of the issues we face now with application development is due to an alignment problem as many are "ahead of their time" as there is not a large user base to leverage. But it is a catch-22 situation, as to get that large user base, there needs to be the applications built that endusers want to use and perhaps, investors want to support. To capture the markets attention long-term, there has to be applications people love.
I am hoping that Hive becomes a community that encourages growth of the ecosystem - even if that growth is imperfect - as that leaves room for continual improvement, the process of innovation.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]