Sometimes when I find myself having trouble groking how fast consumer Internet businesses can scale revenues these days I think it is because of how much we all suffer from the boiled frog syndrome in tech these days.
Boil a pot of water until it is good and roaring and toss the frog in and, as the story goes, it jumps right out. But put him in cold water and heat it up slowly and it's boiled frog legs for dinner.
It's the same for consumers and broadband these days— when you think of all of the services that we rely on now that we've got multi-megabit pipes into the majority of US homes, it's pretty amazing.
I just found out due to a 20 hour outage inspired by byzantine online payments industry (how neanderthal can two computer systems talking to each other really be?)
Here is a list of the stuff that it was painful for my household to live without that didn't exist 10 years ago:
- Bank of America Online Bill Pay (ironically) - Netflix- Pandora
- Audible
- Dropbox
- Evernote
- iTunes App/Content store
- Kindle store/app
And here is a list of the apps that existed a decade ago but which are now considered mission critical:
- Email- Amazon
And note that this is from just a single 20 hour outage!
In a world where people are freaking out about Amazon's cloud and Sony's security, it is worth taking a moment to pause and marvel and how important that "dumb pipe" has become in our everyday lives. After the last day I'm pretty sure this particular house would give up electricity (assuming you could power the relevant devices) before we'd forfeit broadband access.