> Ordering a cab without making a phone call was revolutionary.

With the power of AI, soon you'll be able to say "Hey Siri, get me an Uber to the airport". As easy as making a phone call.

And end up at an airport in an entirely different city.

There was a gain in precision going from phone call to app. There is a loss of precision going from app to voice. The tradeoff of precision for convenience is rarely worth it.

Because if it were, Uber would just make a widget asking "Where do you want to go?" and you'd enter "Airport" and that would be it. If a widget of some action is a bad idea, so is the voice command.

Easier, because you don't have to search for a phone number.

And they'll be able to tack an extra couple dollars onto the price because that's a good signal you're not gonna comparison shop.

Innovation!

You can book a flight or a taxi with a personal assistant app like Siri today. People don't seem very interested in doing so.

Barring some sort of accessibility issue, it's far easier to deal with a visual representation of complex schedule information.

"Do something existing with a different mechanism" is innovative, but not revolutionary, and certainly not a new "product genre". My parents used to order pizza by phone calls, then a website, then an app. It's the same thing. (The friction is a little bit less, but maybe forcing another human to bring food to you because you're feeling lazy should have a little friction. And as a side effect, we all stopped being as comfortable talking to real people on phone calls!)

Napster came before Spotify.

> innovative, but not revolutionary

The experience of Netflix, Spotify, and Uber were revolutionary. It felt like the future, and it worked as expected. Sure, we didn't realize the poison these products were introducing into many creative and labor ecosystems, nor did we fully appreciate how they would operate as means to widen the income inequality gap by concentrating more profits to executives. But they fit cleanly into many of our lives immediately.

Debating whether that's "revolutionary" or "innovative" or "whatever-other-word" is just a semantic sideshow common to online discourse. It's missing the point. I'll use whatever word you want, but it doesn't change the point.

Making simple, small improvements feel revolutionary is good marketing.

"Simple, small" and "good marketing" seem like obvious undersells considering the titanic impacts Netflix and Spotify (for instance) have had on culture, personal media consumption habits, and the economics of industries. But if that's the semantic construction that works for you, so be it.

> They were revolutionary as product genres, not necessary individual companies.

Even then, they were evolutionary at best.

Before Netflix and Spotify, streaming movies and music were already there as a technology, ask anybody with a Megaupload or Sopcast account. What changed was that DMCA acquired political muscle and cross-border reach, wiping out waves of torrent sites and P2P networks. That left a new generation of users with locked-down mobile devices no option but to use legitimate apps who had deals in place with the record labels and movie studios.

Even the concept of "downloading MP3s" disappeared because every mobile OS vendor hated the idea of giving their customers access to the filesystem, and iOS didn't even have a file manager app until well into the next decade (2017).

>every mobile OS vendor

Maybe half? Android has consistently had this capability since its inception.

Yes, but Google left that functionality half baked intentionally, letting 3rd party developers fill the void. Even now the Google Files app feels like a toy compared to Fossify Explorer or Solid Explorer.

> streaming movies and music were already there as a technology, ask anybody with a Megaupload or Sopcast account.

You can't have a revolution without users. It's the ability to reach a large audience, through superior UX, superior business model, superior marketing, etc. which creates the possibility for revolutionary impact.

Which is why Megaupload and Sopcast didn't revolutionize anything.

Is it a revolution if you needed millions of marketing dollars? How many ads did Napster have to run before the whole world knew what MP3s were?

> What changed was that DMCA acquired political muscle and cross-border reach, wiping out waves of torrent sites and P2P networks.

Half true - that was happening some, but wasn't why music piracy mostly died out. DMCA worked on centralized platforms like YouTube, but the various avenues for downloading music people used back then still exist, they're just not used as much anymore. Spotify was proof that piracy is mostly a service problem: it was suddenly easier for most people to get the music they wanted through official channels than through piracy.

DMCA claims took out huge numbers of public torrent trackers which was how 99% of people accessed contraband media. All the way back in 2008, the loss of TorrentSpy.com probably shifted everybody to private trackers, but it's a whack-a-mole game there too and most people won't bother.

DMCA also led to the development of ContentID and automated copyright strike system on Youtube, but it didn't block you from downloading the stream as a high bitrate MP3, which is possible even now.