It's just too easy to make a case by taking a retrospective look at the winners. I want to see a current battleground along with a prediction of which one is the toy and which one is the non-toy.

Here's an example of why it's hard: iPhone vs Android. Well, obviously the iPhone is the toy. You have to do incredibly awkward things, or pay Apple $100, to run your own code on it; you can't tether it (sometimes); you can't replace the Web browser. It's hard to script it. Want to use your favourite email client? Good luck.

But hang on. Clearly Android is the toy. You can pick up Android phones for a lot less than an iPhone. Most of these phones are nowhere near as pretty or as specced out as an iPhone -- but pick one up and you've got the complete Android experience. If you want to hack on it, go ahead. If what you're looking for isn't built in to the phone, chances are someone's written it for you. Sure, it's messy, but that's democracy.

But hold up again. Smartphones are getting cheaper, but who really needs such a powerful, battery-sucking device in their pocket? Maybe the real "toy" of this generation is yet to emerge.

In five years someone will write an article about how obvious it was that iPhones would succeed because they were the simple accessible choice, or that Android would succeed because it was democratising, or that something else entirely would succeed because the smartphone genre was a fad.

Disclaimer: I agree with the general sentiment of the article.

I think it's more subtle than that. For the micro to supplant the mini (mainframes are alive and well, thankyouverymuch) it had to become one. A contemporary PC running Linux or NT is not only faster than a VAX, it is actually more complicated under the hood. This should be easy to prove: do whatever you need to do to get a complete process listing of your preferred system. How much do you, probably an "expert" if you're even reading HN, know about each and every process? Try the same thing on a CP/M box if you have one...

The real lesson is, it's easier to make a simple thing more complex than it is to make a complex thing more simple.

I'm going to nitpick a little bit about the Arduino. Just to be clear, I won an Arduino and love it, but the article misrepresents it a little bit.

It states that the Arduino is a microcontroller. This is false. From the Arduino website:

> Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.

The Arduino is an entire prototyping platform. It includes software which makes it easy to use, and it includes a lot of extra peripherals that make it more expensive. In the professional realm, Arduinos are not that popular. They're just too expensive. The microcontroller that the Arduino uses costs a few dollars, which is a tiny fraction of $30 for the whole board. Any professional will be comfortable enough to just program a basic microcontroller and build the small amount of circuitry to power it.

Nice article. Adds another dimension to the Innovator's Dilemma

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/04/understanding-...

Is it me, or is the author confusing incumbent and enterprise? Office is not 'enterprise' in my book, nor is Yahoo. MS Exchange, maybe. SAP and Salesforce definitely. I'm not sure I see any toys entering that space. Mint is what I can think of that comes closest.

I'm also not convinced by the whole scripting language thing. There is certainly a healthy debate to be had between static and dynamic languages but I'm not sure that too many people poo-poo'd Python or Ruby (unlike PHP). Also to suggest that those have "won" vis-a-vis Java or .Net is jumping the gun somewhat IMO.

Other than that, the central argument is essentially disruption theory, but as gaius points out the idea there is that you start off as a "toy" with a particular advantage which, despite the limitations, allows you to carve out a niche. Then you take over the entire market by growing capacity without losing the initial advantage and pushing the incumbent into an increasingly small niche at the high end. However, by that time the product is fully featured, becomes the incumbent and ceases to be a "toy".

"But as the years passed and hardware became faster the relative slowness of dynamic languages became less relevant, while their advantages in programmer productivity became much more relevant."

Let's not discount the fundamental advances to compilation and performance of "dynamic" languages of relatively recent years. Just look at Javascript.

Dynamic languages look much less amenable to optimization at first than static languages, but many new techniques have been discovered, and sometimes there are even optimizations that are only possible to do at runtime if the environment supports it.

I think the initial definition is incorrect.

A definition of 'toy' needs to include motivation. Most of the time, people will use a toy for its entertainment value rather than its ability to help them carry out productive work. This is the reason that toys aren't always considered as 'serious'.

The essay seems to be suggesting that a small, less complicated product, has a lot of benefits over larger, more complicated products.

I don't think this is surprising.

Toys are indeed great, but don't try and 'win' with them. The rational approach with toys is to play with them.

it isn't that toy will win. It is that the things evolve into the "toys", ie. much better UX.