Maybe re-tune your revolution sensor. None of those are revolutionary companies. Profitable and well executed, sure, but those turn up all the time.
Uber's entire business model was running over the legal system so quickly that taxi licenses didn't have time to catch up. Other than that it was a pretty obvious idea. It is a taxi service. The innovations they made were almost completely legal ones; figuring out how to skirt employment and taxi law.
Netflix was anticipated online by and is probably inferior to YouTube except for the fact that they have a pretty traditional content creator lab tacked on the side to do their own programs. And torrenting had been a thing for a long time already showing how to do online distribution of video content.
I've tried some AI code completion tools and none of them hit me that way. My first reaction was "nobody is actually going to use this stuff" and that opinion hasn't really changed.
And if you think those 3 companies weren't revolutionary then AI code completion is even less than that.
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).
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.
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.
Maybe half? Android has consistently had this capability since its inception.
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.
Innovation!
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.
Barring some sort of accessibility issue, it's far easier to deal with a visual representation of complex schedule information.
Napster came before Spotify.
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.
Not only Uber/Grab (or delivery app) were revolutionary, they are still revolutionary. I could live without LLMs and my life will be slightly impacted when coding. If delivery apps are not available, my life is severely degraded. The other day I was sick. I got medicine and dinner with Grab. Delivered to the condo lobby which is as far as I can get. That is revolutionary.
Rx medicine delivery used to be quite standard for taxis.
It has absolutely massively expanded the kinds of food I can get delivered living in a suburban bordering on rural area. It might be a different experience in cities where the population size made delivery reasonable for many restaurants to offer on their own.
The impact of this was quite revolutionary.
> except for the fact that they have a pretty traditional content creator lab tacked on the side to do their own programs.
The way in which they did this was quite innovative, if not "revolutionary". They used the data they had from the watching habits of their large user base to decide what kinds of content to invest in creating.
In screwing over a lot of people around the world, yes. Otherwise, not really. Ordering rides by app was an obvious next step that's already been pursued independently everywhere.
> They used the data they had from the watching habits of their large user base to decide what kinds of content to invest in creating.
And they successfully created a line of content universally known as something to avoid. Tracks with the "success" of recommendation systems in general.
