Jisoo · November 24, 2025
Doing old things better vs doing brand new things [Translation]
A new technology enables two categories of activity.
One category lets us do things we could already do better: faster, cheaper, more easily, and at higher quality.
The other makes it possible to do entirely new things that were impossible before.
In the early stages of a new technology, the first category tends to attract more attention, but the second is ultimately what has the greater impact on the world.
The reason "doing old things better" gets more attention early on is that it is easier to imagine what to build. Early films were shot like stage plays - effectively plays with better distribution - and only over time did film establish its own visual grammar.
Early electric grids provided brighter, more reliable light than gas lamps or candles. But it took decades for the electrical "app store" to take shape: the ecosystem of appliances connected to the grid. The early web, too, mostly carried pre-internet activities such as letter writing and mail order into digital form. Only in the 2000s did "internet-native" ideas such as social networking, crowdfunding, cryptocurrency, and crowdsourced knowledge bases begin to emerge in earnest.
When people evaluate new technologies, the most common mistake is focusing too much on the "doing old things better" category. For example, when people talk about blockchain's potential, they often focus on cheap, fast global payments. That is important and necessary, but it is only the beginning.
The more interesting things are the entirely new things that could not be built before. One example is an internet service owned and operated directly by its users rather than by a company. Another is enterprise productivity apps designed as web services. Early products such as Salesforce were more accessible and cheaper to maintain than existing on-premise software. By contrast, modern productivity apps such as Google Docs, Figma, and Slack focus on capabilities that were not possible before, including real-time collaboration and deep integrations with other apps.
Entrepreneurs who create "brand new things" usually spend a long time deeply immersed in the technology before arriving at their core insight. The products they build may initially look like toys, strange, unserious, expensive, or sometimes even dangerous. Over time, the products steadily improve, and the world gradually accepts them.
This process can unfold over decades. Emerging technologies such as crypto, machine learning, and virtual reality are still in their early stages. Even mobile devices, cloud hosting, social networks, and perhaps the internet itself may still be early. If so, new families of "native" products built on these technologies will continue to appear.
cdixon - Doing old things better vs doing brand new things