I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.
That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.
It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.
Yeah. Technically I’m not talking about Microsoft, as their primary product is the OS and they are not purely Internet-based. IBM, of course, is much older than that and also has some Internet products, as does every software company.
In my statement “Internet company” means a company whose only product is SaaS on the Internet; i.e. someone who, if they went away, their product would disappear with them.
Google is actually the sine qua non of what I’m talking about. I’ll concede that it’s possible Google as a corporate entity will still exist in 2048 (it was founded in 1998). But Google has undergone such a drastic and dystopian management change that it’s almost not even the same company now–
–but that isn’t relevant to what I’m actually talking about, which is the products. The proposition that Slack logs would still be around 50 years from now was what catalyzed my quip. Google kills everything it makes, usually quickly. Will we be able to look at Google Reader logs in 2048? Or–even closer to the target–Google Wave logs? Google Podcasts? Google Stadia? (I could go on.)
At the end of the day it was just a quip, but I fully expect the SaaS companies you currently think of as indestructible titans to be on the dustheap of history in 20 years, let alone 50.
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