A Confluence of Enabling Technologies

In the years leading  up to the release of the iPhone, all the technologies that made it possible were already in existence. We had touchscreens, cell phones, GPS devices, MP3 players, smart(ish) phones and even attempts at tablets. Everything was there, but no one could figure out how to put it all together. We had separate devices for GPS, listening to music, browsing the internet, reading email and making calls. While we had all the technologies and even could use them in commercial products, no one had figured out how to best put them together in a new and innovative product that really made these technologies work.

Now we've got new technologies and devices like this one (Microsoft's Hololens):

And this one (Amazon Echo with Alexa):

This guy (Nest):

And even this on our phones:

There are many, many more examples.

It feels like we are in a place very similar to where we were prior to 2007 and the introduction of the iPhone. There are a lot of enabling technologies like machine learning, bots, augmented reality, virtual reality, IoT and other ways for increasingly intelligent devices to interact with and change the world around us.

We might think, "Sure I can do a lot of this stuff now on my Alexa and Android or iPhone and I just got an Occulus Rift." But like the world prior to 2007 it doesn't feel like the current batch of products really has this all right. Not in the way that the early PCs did for in home computers, or the way the Mac fundamentally changed how we interacted with them in 1984, or even how battery, display, processor and OS improvements led the way to the laptop. It wasn't the existence of the internet that brought us online, it was the standardization of HTML, the web browser and distribution technologies like DSL that put it all together.

I'm not saying that tomorrow there is going to be some new revolutionary device and we're all going to stop using our smart phones. But it does feel like there is increasing momentum for something new. All these new technologies are not being used to their fullest and the current standard device platforms for delivering these technologies seem clunky at best. The smart phone is no longer the revolutionary platform that it was, it hasn't been for a while. It may take several years for this to bubble over in a usable way but it's time to start preparing. If you haven't started to learn machine learning or about augmented reality, perhaps now is the time to start investigating how these technologies work.