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A comment on Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014.

Re:Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Li... by smsm42 on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @04:27PM (#6996787)
One of the funny things is the video-phone. The technology is there for years, and we can't really say we don't do it at all - we do it sometimes. But mostly we don't - not because technology is not there but because it turned out it's not that great an idea after all. Turns out in most of the situations we don't actually need the video and voice only is good enough. It is fascinating how many people didn't think it would be the case.
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Re:Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Li... by sd8f9iu on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @04:46PM (#6996875)
I didn't realize at first that we had basically accomplished video-phones via Skype, Hangouts, and the internet. Seeing video chat was not very surprising for me, perhaps because it was such an obvious extension of the internet. It's funny how something that I had dreamed of as a kid, and always imagined as a dedicated hardware unit, became completely trivialized and overshadowed by the internet.
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Re:Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Li... by minutetominute on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @05:43PM (#6997116)
Infinite Jest actually covers this topic in a really comical way. The author talks about how people dislike the way they look on the video phones and therefore begin to wear masks that look like made-up versions of themselves. Eventually, they start putting up little pictures of themselves instead of actually attending to the video call, and video phones basically return to voice phones with a picture.
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Re:Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Li... by smsm42 on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @10:39PM (#6998067)
Google Hangouts conveniently offers you an option to do that, among other things :)
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Re:Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Li... by naboavida84 on Thursday January 02, 2014 @11:54AM (#7000540)
More than not needing, people don't want video in most situations. I remember people saying: "how could I tell to my wife that im at work and not at the bar?"

This is how innovation works in terms of reference dependence, we weight the new features versus the previous ones and decide if there is a gain, or several. Additionaly, loss aversion will be included in the formula and make it harder to change.

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