Tech - Where’s the next big thing? No-one seems to know
I’m detecting growing themes of pointlessness and concern among tech-business commentators. I summarise these themes as:
- Too many me-too new ventures offering trivial variations and extensions of social networking services, which themselves are over-hyped - ie. social networking won’t save the world.
- Too many ventures hoping to be viable by being “free” i.e. earning a living through advertising, when there is little evidence it works as a business model for anything other than a few special cases.
- Too few new solutions (and therefore too few new ventures) for the major challenges facing the world today.
… the notion that all online services need to be free and paid for with advertising; there are too many startups that are dependent on a business model that has yet to prove itself for tech companies…
… there are few bold “aha” ideas, lot’s of social “-this or -that”, and mostly a bunch of companies hoping to draft on the perceived success of a few gorillas.
One seismic change that’s only just begun is the take-up of utility computing and subscription-based business applications delivered over the internet; but even that’s at least 10 years overdue and, if we’re really being honest, just a modern version of the old online bureau services model from the 1970s - when I began my IT career!
At Read/Write/Web, Marshall Kirkpatrick answers his own question “What’s the next big thing?” with this list:
- Business models
- Filtering for information overload
- Standards and interoperability
- Outsourcing API services
- Backlash (Backlash is included in our list because there is definitely some push back)
That list looks to me more like fixing bugs and variations on current themes, rather than genuine new ideas. Umair Haque at HarvardOnline is blistering:
I’m vastly disappointed in the moral and strategic bankruptcy of today’s crop of venture investors and so-called revolutionaries.
There are huge shocks rolling across the global economic landscape… It is the obligation of radical innovators to create new value by solving these problems - or cede capital and resources to those who can and who will.
But today’s revolutionaries are sheep in wolves’ clothing. They’re lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they’re cutting deals with one another to try and sell more ads. That is, when they’re not too busy partying.
I’ll close by quoting Jeff Nolan again:
Trackback uriWhat’s frightening is the inability to answer the basic question “What’s next?” The Valley thrives on “The New New Thing” … and with every turn of a generation, there is an awkward moment where we’re just figuring out where we’ve been but have yet to see where we are going. Right now is that moment.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Jim, I think there’s one more bullet point to add to your summary.
Something along the lines of the game-playing. The industry has created a game and it’s become more important how well you play that game rather than what you’re playing the game with. That’s why you have a million me-too variation-on-a-theme services that actually get some attention. They know how to play the game that gets them coverage.
The further back you stand, the more it looks like a high school popularity contest.
Bring on the backlash… (fingers crossed I keep my job
)
April 30th, 2008 at 11:25 am
The IT industry is the most hyped sector in terms of media coverages. Even a startup company (not sure if they’re still in business or not) that developed a website so people with stolen properties could register those items with the website. Yep, it was a featured article on the Herald business section about a year ago.
State of the art & cutting-edge technology local company such
Compac Sort are not given much publicity at all in our local media. Compac Sort computer vision based software system is a world beater and they continue to gain new markets overseas.
The Herald has an IT section, to promote the IT related web-xxx hypes every week, but there is no section to cover the wider innovations from other industrial software applications, such as Compac Sort and the likes.
April 30th, 2008 at 11:34 am
[…] a lot of discussion about the Web, the Web 2.0 and 3.0 and whatever else lies ahead and may become the next big thing. Ever since Spencer Johnson told us that the cheese is moving, and Clayton Christensen explained […]
April 30th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Nice post Jim.
I think there are some big things developing. Naturally I think VortexDNA is one of them
but i also like the way P2P financing is developing. As a monetary reformer I believe the banking system is reaching the end of its useful life and in the next 10 years we will see P2P finance as the norm.
That is a very big idea which people haven’t fully grasped. P2P is an idea that needed a delivery system, which is exactly what the internet is whether coming online, mobile or in another way.
My experience with VCs in the Valley is that they seem to throw money at ideas which, to me at least, seem less than groundbreaking and as you say tend to be variations on the same theme of eyeballs and click rates.
The next big thing, by its very nature, is unlikely to be funded out of a system where conformity is becoming the norm.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Great post Jim and I couldn’t agree more - seems people waver between getting excited about the new 2.0 developments (Facebook, Twitter, Seesmic etc etc) for their own sake, and getting excited about the opportunities they present.
But what opportunities do they actually present? Despite being a 2.0 evangelist it has to be said that thus far they’ve mainly been long on promise and short on delivery. That’s not necessarily a criticism of the products themselves, but rather an admission that we haven’t yet worked out how to use these tools for everyday real life gains.
My own perspective for example is that SaaS is an excellent thing - but only because it creates efficiencies that make life easier for people and allow them to leverage their skills and ameliorate their weaknesses.
So coming full circle my perspective is that all these incremental changes do indeed remove our focus from the task at hand, which is/should be trying to work out how to actually use these tools on a day to day basis
cheers
ben
May 1st, 2008 at 6:01 pm
[…] Tech - Where’s the next big thing? No-one seems to know […]
May 1st, 2008 at 7:40 pm
[…] These 2 companies are blazing a trail for the rest of the finance industry. P2P finance could well be the next big thing. […]