I was frankly shocked at some of the things mentioned here. Instagram? Wix.com? Uber? Discord? Seriously?

BUT that got me thinking: Could it be that a large portion of the 10x improvement could be in marketing, i.e. you'll have to be able to market your product as "10 times as good", regardless of whether or not it actually is?

AND secondly, could it be that many if not most products that are marketed as 10x as good are also - at the same time - 10x worse?

Just picking random examples from the thread:

- Gmail: Definitely 5-10 times better than Outlook Express or Horde. But also at least 10x worse when it comes to support, privacy, flexibility, agency in regard to your own data and server configuration and many other areas.

- Siri/Alexa: Speech recognition and what you can do with it is easily 10x better than what existed before. However, again at least 10x worse in terms of what you can control about the underlying technology and hardware and in terms of (controlling) what happens with the recordings of your voice. Also, if you want to go so far (someone mentioned dictation, more generally) you could also include lost jobs (e.g. secretarial jobs/assistants). Not convinced so much myself by this argument though.

- AWS Workspace: That might be somewhat more cost-effective and easier to set-up than a local VDI infrastructure. But in many ways it is, or can be, 10x or infinitely worse than having your own server.

- Wix.com: 10x easier to use than Notepad++ for web development (if you don't know what you're doing) but arguably at least 10x worse for good websites, web developers and designers, people locked into subscription payments, limits on flexibility etc.

Other "great innovators", like Reddit (severely optimised towards monetisation, data extraction and advertising over the last years), Uber (questionable employment practices and corporate culture), even Google making memorisation unnecessary (everything's just a click away... but what happens if the internet is down?) and Amazon ("killing local businesses since 1994" ;-)) also could be argued to come with severe downsides.

Personally, I would greatly appreciate much more widespread 2x innovation vs. chasing the rare unicorn 10x innovators.

70 MBit/s internet would be much nicer than the 35 I can get right now. I don't need (nor would be willing to pay for) 350, let alone if the 350 are only available in large cities.
If Gmail was just one tenth as innovative in parsing my mails for data nuggets and instead cared ten times more about my privacy, I would be more than okay with that.

Personally, real 10x innovations without large apparent downsides (although there might be some) for me right now are Wikipedia and Starlink. I also want to mention Delphi, whose approach to programming and UI design was at some point definitely a 10x innovation over existing solutions at the time (in many ways it still can be 2x as good even today, but unfortunately, they've also increased the price 10x and stopped caring for their users).

On a grander scale, a well-working and ethical interplanetary species/society might also be a 10x improvement over being confined to Earth only. But that might very well turn out to be incorrect.

As always, if you disagree, please DON'T downvote, instead reply and tell me why and how you Think Different™. I post here because I'm curious to discuss, not just to share and read isolated opinions.