Tens of thousands of man hours have gone into making them seem trivial, and the fact that they seem so to you is a testament to their design.
Well the fact that they've hammered on them for years doesn't mean they're not trivial, it just means they've spent a lot of time on them. And I think we've got to differentiate between the app being [non-]trivial and the infrastructure behind it supporting the massive load being [non-]trivial.
Re:San Francisco Bubble
by Inthenameofmine on Friday January 29, 2016 @02:25PM
(#10997792)
Uber and Airbnb are most definitely not trivial. Anybody who has ever worked on a remotely complex two sided marketplace project can tell you that. The UI/UX alone is incredibly hard yo nail down. The fact that they made you think that they're trivial really shows that they are doing a lot of things right.
Trivial applications require tens of thousands of man hours. Actually, a lot more to make it scale. By trivial I don't mean "it doesn't require a lot of work". Any application requires a lot of work. By "trivial" I meant that they're not creating anything significantly new technology wise, and the value they create is mostly by making existing work/services easier to use and provide.
If they were trivial then they'd have been eaten up by competitor now.
They're technically trivial. But execution ain't.
I agree, but this is mostly true because there's so much low-hanging fruit out there. If you look at the current successful startups like Uber and Airbnb, they're really trivial applications. That doesn't mean they can't create huge amounts of value by "trivially" repackaging services and connecting people.
Once the low-hanging fruit is developed during the next 10 years or so we can finally start focusing on actual high-tech engineering startups.