Hindsight can be 50/50
summary
A sequence of concrete case studies decides whether hindsight matters: Internet Explorer’s standards dance and Microsoft’s internal pivot (wins the browser war then frays internally), Android briefly closed-source around Kindle Fire and now 88% market share (Google layers closed services, Chrome fines follow), the rise and fall of Cydia and jailbreak ecosystem declines (fewer users, fragile developer base), and small surprises like rats reshaping Easter Island narratives — each claim names tools, numbers, and whether something actually worked.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:31Who is the speaker and why this talk
- 3:15Hindsight and the fallibility of history
- 6:07Fall of Rome and historiography
- 10:24History as guessing and bias
- 10:45Easter Island collapse theories
- 13:13History as agreed fable
- 13:56Microsoft and IE fable
- 23:44Microsoft’s decline and Google’s rise
- 27:41Google as new Microsoft
- 29:05Android open source fall
- 31:12Jailbreaking decline lessons
- 37:32Web fall and eternal September
- 40:40Centralization vs federated systems
- 42:45Current work and closing
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