Whatever happened to the Next Big Things?

In tech, this was the smartphone decade. In 2009, Symbian was still the dominant ‘smartphone’ OS, but 2010 saw the launch of the iPhone 4, the Samsung Galaxy S, and the Nexus One, and today Android and iOS boast four billion combined active devices. Smartphones and their apps are a mature market, now, not a disruptive new platform. So what’s next?

The question presupposes that something has to be next, that this is a law of nature. It’s easy to see why it might seem that way. Over the last thirty-plus years we’ve lived through three massive, overlapping, world-changing technology platform shifts: computers, the Internet, and smartphones. It seems inevitable that a fourth must be on the horizon.

There have certainly been no shortage of nominees over the last few years. AR/VR; blockchains; chatbots; the Internet of Things; drones; self-driving cars. (Yes, self-driving cars would be a platform, in that whole new sub-industries would erupt around them.) And yet one can’t help but notice that every single one of those has fallen far short of optimistic predictions. What is going on?

You may recall that the growth of PCs, the Internet, and smartphones did not ever look wobbly or faltering. Here’s a list of Internet users over time: from 16 million in 1995 to 147 million in 1998. Here’s a list of smartphone sales since 2009: Android went from sub-1-million units to over 80 million in just three years. That’s what a major platform shift looks like.

Let’s compare each of the above, shall we? I don’t think it’s an unfair comparison. Each has had champions arguing it will, in fact, be That Big, and even people with more measured expectations have predicted growth will at least follow the trajectory of smartphones or the Internet, albeit maybe to a lesser peak. But in fact…

AR/VR: Way back in 2015 I spoke to a very well known VC who confidently predicted a floor of 10 million devices per year well before the end of this decade. What did we get? 3.7M to 4.7M to 6M, 2017 through 2019, while Oculus keeps getting reorg’ed. A 27% annual growth rate is OK, sure, but a consistent 27% growth rate is more than a little worrying for an alleged next big thing; it’s a long, long way from “10xing in three years.” Many people also predicted that by the end of this decade Magic Leap would look like something other than an utter shambles. Welp. As for other AR/VR startups, their state is best described as “sorry.”

Blockchains: I mean, Bitcoin’s doing just fine, sure, and is easily the weirdest and most interesting thing to have happened to tech in the 2010s; but the entire rest of the space? I’m broadly a believer in cryptocurrencies, but if you were to have suggested in mid-2017 to a true believer that, by the end of 2019, enterprise blockchains would essentially be dead, decentralized app usage would still be measured in the low thousands, and no real new use cases would have arisen other than collateralized lending for a tiny coterie — I mean, they would have been outraged. And yet, here we are.

Chatbots: No, seriously, chatbots were celebrated as the platform of the future not so long ago. (Alexa, about which more in a bit, is not a chatbot.) “The world is about to be re-written, and bots are going to be a big part of the future” was an actual quote. Facebook M was the future. It no longer exists. Microsoft’s Tay was the future. It really no longer exists. It was replaced by Zo. Did you know that? I didn’t. Zo also no longer exists.

The Internet of Things: let’s look at a few recent headlines, shall we? “Why IoT Has Consistently Fallen Short of Predictions.” “Is IoT Dead?” “IoT: Yesterday’s Predictions vs. Today’s Reality.” Spoiler: that last one does not discuss about how reality has blown previous predictions out of the water. Rather, “The reality turned out to be far less rosy.”

Drones: now, a lot of really cool things are happening in the drone space, I’ll be the first to aver. But we’re a long way away from physical packet-switched networks. Amazon teased Prime Air delivery way back in 2015 and made its first drone delivery way back in 2016, which is also when it patented its blimp mother ship. People expected great things. People still expect great things. But I think it’s fair to say they expected … a bit more … by now.

Self-driving cars: We were promised so much more, and I’m not even talking about Elon Musk’s hyperbole. From 2016: “10 million self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020.” “True self-driving cars will arrive in 5 years, says Ford“. We do technically have a few, running in a closed pilot project in Phoenix, courtesy of Waymo, but that’s not what Ford was talking about: “Self-driving Fords that have no steering wheels, brake or gas pedals will be in mass production within five years.” So, 18 months from now, then. 12 months left for that “10 million” prediction. You’ll forgive a certain skepticism on my part.

The above doesn’t mean we haven’t seen any successes, of course. A lot of new kinds of products have been interesting hits: AirPods, the Apple Watch, the Amazon Echo family. All three are more new interfaces than whole new major platforms, though; not so much a gold rush as a single vein of silver.

You may notice I left machine learning / AI off the list. This is in part because it definitely has seen real qualitative leaps, but a) there seems to be a general concern that we may have entered the flattening of an S-curve there, rather than continued hypergrowth, b) either way, it’s not a platform. Moreover, the wall that both drones and self-driving cars have hit is labelled General Purpose Autonomy … in other words, it is an AI wall. AI does many amazing things, but when people predicted 10M self-driving cars on the roads next year, it means they predicted AI would be good enough to drive them. In fact it’s getting there a lot slower than we expected.

Any one of these technologies could define the next decade. But another possibility, which we have to at least consider, is that none of them might. It is not an irrefutable law of nature that just as one major tech platform begins to mature another must inevitably start its rise. We may well see a lengthy gap before the next Next Big Thing. Then we may see two or three rise simultaneously. But if your avowed plan is that this time you’re totally going to get in on the ground floor — well, I’m here to warn you, you may have a long wait in store.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/22/whatever-happened-to-the-next-big-things/

On the Amazon panopticon

Last year, “Amazon employees met with ICE officials … to market the company’s facial recognition technology,” the ACLU informs us. Amazon VP Brad Huseman later said “We believe the government should have the best available technology.” Then, last month, Motherboard revealed Amazon has partnered with police departments around the country to create “a self-perpetuating surveillance network” of Ring products.

Allow me to be the umpteenth to say: what the hell, Amazon?

Amazon shareholders, tech employees, warehouse employees, and customers are all protesting this marketing of Rekognition to ICE, as well as the services provided by Amazon to infamous Palantir. More than 500 Amazon tech employees, in particular, have signed a letter of protest — but Amazon’s leadership does not yet seem to be willing to engage with them in good faith.

Instead, Amazon has defended itself with a “Facts on Facial Recognition with Artificial Intelligence” page, in which they seem to think the only possible problem with their technology is the possibility of false positives, and offer halfhearted half-measures as “In all public safety and law enforcement scenarios, technology like Amazon Rekognition should only be used to narrow the field of potential matches … facial recognition software should not be used autonomously.”

The technical concerns are real enough, as shown by Orlando’s cancellation of their pilot Rekognition program. But I’m tired of tech companies acting as if they have no responsibility to the public beyond fixing their bugs and getting their tech working as intended. Sometimes the intent itself is the problem.

“I feel that society develops an immune response eventually to the bad uses of new technology, but it takes time,” Jeff Bezos has said. Which is true as far as it goes. But a corollary is that, in the interim, while society hasn’t developed immune responses, we should be especially cautious about abuses. Another is that the world’s wealthiest man should not abdicate his own nontrivial part in optimizing society’s responses to new technologies.

The question is not whether Rekognition’s technical problems are solvable. The question is whether marketing it to governments and law enforcement in order to enable ubiquitous panopticon surveillance is good for any society in the world. It’s dangerously intellectually lazy to say “if it’s currently legal it must be fine” or “the institutions of democracy will protect us from harm, therefore as a tech maven I don’t need to think or worry about any consequences.”

In realitym the law is extremely slow to react to new technologies, and our institutions are increasingly sclerotic and paralyzed — as Silicon Valley will be all too eager to tell you in other contexts. Relying on them for our “immune response” is wilful negligence. Yes, technology, like fire, can be used for both good and bad; but we are rightfully far more cautious about fire in tinderbox conditions than during the rainy season, and we adjust our risk assessment accordingly. The unwillingness of tech companies to accept any responsibility for the risks they create is beyond worrying.

As I’ve said before, the only real, or at least real-time, check on tech companies is their own employees. So it’s heartening to see AWS employees push back against company policies — and worrying to see Amazon refuse to engage with them in good faith. The world expects better of Bezos and Amazon than dodging important questions about the risks of their technologies, while passing those off as someone else’s department.

Facebook provides another cautionary tale. Hard as it may be to believe now, not all long ago, they were widely respected, trusted, even beloved. A backlash against companies like Amazon and Facebook seems at first like a few minor cavils from an extremist fringe … but sometimes the pebbles of complaint suddenly accumulate into a landslide of contempt. Let’s hope Amazon sees the light before the techlash turns yet another erstwhile hero into a thoroughly modern villain.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/04/on-the-amazon-panopticon/

Meet the tech boss, same as the old boss

“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It seems darkly funny, now, that anyone ever dared to dream that tech would be different. But we did, once. We would build new companies in new ways, was the thinking, not like the amoral industrial behemoths of old. The corporate villains of 90s cyberpunk were fresh in our imaginations. We weren’t going to be like that. We were going to show that you could get rich, do good, and treat everyone who worked for or interacted with your business with fundamental decency, all at the same time.

The poster child for this was, of course, Google, whose corporate code of conduct for fifteen years famously included the motto “don’t be evil.” No longer, and the symbolism is all too apt. Since removing that phrase in 2015, we’ve all witnessed reports of widespread sexual harassment, including 13 senior managers fired for it; Project Maven; and Project Dragonfly. Internal backlashes and a mass walkout led to retractions and changes, courtesy of Google employees rather than management … and now we’re seeing multiple reports of management retaliation against those employees.

Facebook? I mean, where do we even begin. Rootkits on teenagers‘ phones. Privacy catastrophe after privacy catastrophe. Admissions that they didn’t do enough to prevent Facebook-fostered violence in Myanmar. Sheryl Sandberg personally ordering opposition research on a Facebook critic. And those are just stories from the last six months alone!

Amazon? Consider how they overwork and underpay delivery drivers and warehouse workers. Apple? Consider how they “deny Chinese users the ability to install the VPN and E2E messaging apps that would allow them to avoid pervasive censorship and surveillance,” to quote Stanford’s Alex Stamos. Microsoft? The grand dame of the Big Five has mostly evolved into a quiet enterprise respectability, but has recently seen “dozens of” reports of sexual harassment and discrimination ignored by HR, along with demands for cancellation of the HoloLens military contract.

Those are the five most valuable publicly traded companies in the world. It’s far from “absolute power,” but it’s far more power than the tech industry has had before. Have we avoided corruption and complacency? Have we done things differently? Have we been better than our predecessors? Not half so much as we hoped back in the giddy early days of the Internet. Not a quarter. Not an eighth.

And it’s mostly so gratuitous. Google didn’t need to try to build a censored search engine for China. They don’t need the money — they’re a giant money-printing machine already — and the Chinese people don’t need their product. Amazon doesn’t need to treat its lower-paid workers with vicious contempt. (It’s true they finally — finally! — raised their minimum wage to $15, but it could very easily afford to make their pay and working conditions substantially better yet.) Facebook doesn’t need to … to increasingly act like a company whose management is composed largely of wide-eyed cultists and/or mustache-twirling villains, basically.

Google should have promoted the organizers of their walkout, but there, at least, you can see why they didn’t. Raw fear. The one thing which truly frightens the management of big tech companies, more than regulators, more than competitors, more than climate change, is their own employees.

Is it that the modern megacorps have inherited from their forebears the obsession with growth at all costs, a religious drive to cast their net over every aspect of the entire world, so it’s still not enough for each of those companies to make billions upon billions from advertising and commerce to spend on their famous — and now sometimes infamous — “moonshot” projects? (Don’t talk to me about the fiduciary duty of maximum profit. Tech senior management can interpret that “duty” however they see fit.)

Is it that any sufficiently large and wealthy organization becomes, in its upper reaches, a nest of would-be Game of Thrones starlets, playing power politics with their pet projects and personal careers, regardless of the costs and repercussions? (At least when they are born of hypergrowth; it’s noticeable that more-mature Apple and Microsoft, while imperfect, still seem by some considerable distance the least objectionable of these Big Five, and Facebook the most so.)

I don’t want to sound like I think the tech industry is guilty of ruining everything. Not at all. The greatest trick the finance industry ever pulled is somehow convincing (some of) the world that it’s the tech industry who are the primary drivers of inequality. As for the many media who seem to be trying to pin recent election outcomes, and all other ills of the world, on tech, well —

Honestly I'm a little sick of journalists blaming tech for all that ails us as if "tech" put Hillary Clinton's emails on their front pages for months straight.

— Catherine Bracy (@cbracy) April 24, 2019

But the existence of greater failures should not blind us to our own, and whether we have failed in an old way or a new one is moot. Accepting this failure is — at least for people like me who were once actually dumb/optimistic enough to believe that things might be different this time — an important step towards trying to build something better.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/28/meet-the-tech-boss-same-as-the-old-boss/

Branded Worlds: how technology recentralized entertainment

I love Hollywood box-office numbers because they provide a hard statistical view of cultural currents. Did you know, for instance, that there had never been a weekend when 8 of the top 10 movies in America were sequels — until this month? Or that, while almost 400 movies were released in the first half of 2018, nearly 40% of their total accumulated revenue came from just four releases, all of which were superhero sequels?

This is not what was supposed to happen. Ten years ago people thought that visual storytelling would be democratized; that new cameras, new editing suites, cheap streaming, and BitTorrent would combine to render high-cost obsolete-infrastructure Hollywood irrelevant. A worldwide cohort of genius independent filmmakers would use this new generation of accessible tools to slowly supplant Hollywood studios and producers as the drivers of visual and narrative culture.

Hoo boy, did that ever not happen. Instead we just added a few new gatekeepers to the entertainment oligarchy: YouTube, Amazon, Netflix. Instead of a new era of auteurs, of unique voices and stories, the entertainment industry has had enormous success doing the complete opposite: doubling down on sequels, and expanding brands and franchises into massive worlds of corporate-licensed, committee-written, producer-driven branded entertainment, often spanning movies, television, books, video games, and amusement parks. The Marvel Cinematic (and televised) Universe. Worlds of DC. Star Wars. Star Trek. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Jurassic World.

This is not in and of itself a bad thing. I’m a fan of most of those myself. But it’s worth asking; why didn’t we get that decentralized diaspora of auteurs that was once widely predicted? And what are the longer-term effects of the triumph of Branded Worlds on the grassroots, and the next generations, of pop culture?

There are two answers to the first question: cost and time. Maybe it’s a lot easier to shoot and edit movies/TV than it used to be, but sets, locations, actors, scripts — those are all expensive and difficult. Better amateur work is still far from professional. And while it’s true we’re seeing interesting new visual modes of storytelling, e.g. on Twitch and YouTube,  it’s very rarely narrative fiction, and it’s still  distributed and monetized via Twitch and YouTube, gatekeepers who implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) shape what’s popular.

More importantly, though, democratizing the means of production does not increase demand. A 10x increase in the number of TV shows, however accessible they may be, does not 10x the time any person spends watching television. For a time the “long tail” theory, that you could make a lot of money from niche audiences as long as your total accessible market grew large enough, was in vogue. This was essentially a mathematical claim, that audience demand was “fat-tailed” rather than “thin-tailed.”

But it seems that the demand for entertainment is quite thin-tailed indeed. The more options we have, the more we seem to want characters we already know, in worlds with which we’re already familiar. This makes sense — it takes a lot of work to engage with a new world and a new cast, with no guarantee at all that they will be worth the effort. But the result is that Branded Worlds increasingly feel like vast open-world video games, even including side quests (Rogue One or Ant-Man And The Wasp) along with the “main story,” and a seemingly endless amount of new downloadable content.

I also suspect that many-chaptered, many-charactered worlds are more viable than they used to be because we’re more connected to them. Did you miss a Marvel movie leading up to Infinity War? Well, you can recap its handful of key and killer scenes on YouTube, in fifteen minutes, without having to rent/watch the whole thing. Did you miss the last episode of a TV show, or do you just want to skip to its conclusion? If it has enough cultural resonance, Vulture or The AVClub probably posted a recap you can use as quick Cliff’s Notes. We can dip our toes into Branded Worlds whenever we like, in between diving into them at a movie theater or serious bingewatching session.

The other interesting question is: what does the growing supremacy of Branded Worlds mean for the next generation of writers, directors, and producers? Obviously producers will try to turn tentpoles into sequels, and sequels into franchises, as before; but now they have a new goal, that of transforming a franchise into the apotheosis of a Branded World. (Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Westworld are obvious candidates, though each faces its own set of hurdles.)

Obviously writers and directors are incentivized to create what is most likely to be successful. This doesn’t mean the complete absence of standalone one-offs — we’ve also seen that horror, long a springboard for auteurs breaking into the biz, seems to give us one surprise crossover hit every year, such as Get Out and A Quiet Place. But it does mean that creators will focus on worlds as much as stories, and that fanfiction will become a completely viable path into the industry — after all, writing within a Branded World is simply paid fanfiction. (Creators will also be incentivized to write stories which might do well in China’s burgeoning market, but that’s a different post.)

Again, none of this is intrinsically bad. What I worry about a little, though, is whether the demand for entertainment is so thin-tailed that, as the number of Branded Worlds increases, that demand begins to end with them. It’s pretty clear that once a Branded World gets big enough it doesn’t necessarily have to be good to be successful. (See Age of Ultron, Batman v Superman, the bad Star Trek movies, arguably Solo, etc.) Left-field hits like Get Out are funded because their collective batting average is acceptably high. If Branded Worlds take enough of the mindshare of the masses that the batting average of original works drops faster than their production cost, then we’ll start seeing even fewer of those.

Will that happen? I can’t say — but I can tell you that a good way to measure whether it’s happening is to look at the weekend box office a few years from now and see if, for the first time, fully 9 out of the top 10 are sequels. Watch the numbers; they rarely lie.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/29/branded-worlds-how-technology-recentralized-entertainment/

The piggyback problem

I wanted to write about scooter startups this week, but, alas, I failed to care enough about them to muster any opinion at all. The problem is that they are pure piggyback startups, and pure piggyback startups are boring because they have no chance of being genuinely transformative.

Let me explain. Many, or even most, successful tech startups / movements succeed because they manage to piggyback on existing infrastructure. This is so painfully obvious it’s almost a truism, where the infrastructure is “the Internet” or “smartphones” — but there are other kinds, too. In its early days, Amazon was a pure piggyback startup, relying on UPS/FedEx/postal infrastructure. Similarly, the scooter startups are obviously reliant on existing city infrastructure.

Hollywood movies follow a three-act structure, and so do transformative tech startups and movements. Act I almost always consists of piggybacking on pre-existing infrastructure. In Act II, they build / evolve their own new, custom core infrastructure. And in Act III, their new platform begins to supplant and obsolete existing / establishment infrastructure.

Consider Amazon, who have evolved their own infrastructure in the form of gargantuan and increasingly automated fulfillment centers — Act II — and are now reportedly launching its own delivery service, while decimating shopping malls — Act III. (Though it’s true that the so-called “retail apocalypse” is more complicated than that. ) Consider Uber and Lyft, who are still in Act I, relying on externally driven vehicles, but fighting to transition into a self-driving Act II.

Amazon also combined Acts II and III with AWS, of course, since that was a once-in-a-generation case where there was no existing/establishment infrastructure. Similarly, Google has a long history of unleashing its internal Act II infrastructure to become Act III industry transformers, eg MapReduce, Kubernetes, and TensorFlow.

An even more unusual example is Bitcoin, which evolved its parallel infrastructure (miners and nodes) from scratch straight into Act III, an extraordinary instance of bootstrap levitation. This succeeded at first purely because it was so technically interesting and innovative, and subsequently because it was built from the ground up to incentivize infrastructure growth — to the Sorceror’s-Apprentice-esque point where it’s possible that as much as one in every thousand watts of electricity generated worldwide today, and counting, goes to securing the Bitcoin blockchain.

You usually want to piggyback before you evolve your own infrastructure, lest you become Webvan, although there are several spectacular exceptions. Elon Musk has spent his career trying to build third-act companies; PayPal topped out at Act II, so he went on to SpaceX (which started in Act II after Musk’s attempt to piggyback on Russian ICBMs didn’t work out, and is now clearly in Act III, beginning to supplant the existing launch-industrial complex) and Tesla (which similarly launched into Act II and, is extremely ambitiously, aiming for Act III vs. the multitrillion-dollar installed base of global oil infrastructure.)

But, like American lives, some startup have no second acts. This is what I call the “piggyback problem”; when there’s no apparent way to evolve your own infrastructure. To be clear, this is not necessarily a business or financial problem. AirBnB leaps to mind as an example of an extremely successful pure Act I startup; it’s made arguable attempts towards Act II infrastructure, but I don’t think the path there is particularly clear. I’m sure its founders and backers are weeping all the way to the bank.

However, this does make AirBnB a little … well … boring. And the same is true of scooter startups. They are all strictly Act I piggyback startups, and I can’t see how they might get to Act II in the viciously contested, heavily regulated environment of the modern city. (Lest anyone argue that they are infrastructure, this is only true in a trivial sense; the point is that they rely on external infrastructure.) Not that there’s anything wrong with being Act I. But Act III is where tomorrow is born.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/10/the-piggyback-problem/