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A comment on Whatever happened to the Next Big Things?.

Re:Whatever happened to the Next Big Things? by allo37 on Monday December 23, 2019 @06:42PM (#21868525)
I feel like a lot of "Next Big things" incubate for much longer than people realize. It's usually that some technological tipping point is reached where a good-yet-impractical idea suddenly becomes just a practical idea and it takes off.

If someone said that computers were a "dead" next big thing when they were invented, they would have been considered right until the advent of integrated circuits!

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Re:Whatever happened to the Next Big Things? by njarboe on Monday December 23, 2019 @09:11PM (#21869287)
Patents last 20 years, so when a new big thing gets discovered people and companies quickly patent lots of things about it. Then, 20 years later, the patents have expired and you can start to have a large amount of new interest as people are not constrained by the patents anymore.
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