Prognosticating is dangerous. People look at the world around them and think “here is a pattern that will last”.

If you go out decades into the future, this becomes even more risky. Will we be using post-it notes in 20 years? Some might say “I guarantee it”. Jason Fried did at startup school. I think this is really arrogant, especially for a technologist, because 20 years is a very long time.

His point is that useful lasts. Useful certainly lasts longer, but what we consider useful is extremely temporal. I would guess that more likely than not, in 20 years you will be able to think something, and send it to a computer. That could easily cause most people to consider a pen or postit note “useless”.

Will you be using * in 20 years? Maybe. If it is really useful, it is more likely.

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This is a tweet that turned into a post, which is probably evidence of the bad parts of twitter. I’m distracting from the other half of the tweet, which is that his talk is excellent. I agree will almost all his ideas.

Generally, I don’t like rhetorical extreme. It would be enough to say that “useful lasts”. Exaggeration to prove a point is a distraction. That is a common flaw in the blogging at 37 Signals. It is almost certainly a byproduct of their selling more byproducts - which misalign incentives in this case.