Giants running towards the same horizon
I was reading Kara Swisher’s piece in Recode about Yahoo’s “Sale Book” and one part stuck out for me in particular.
I’ll be writing about more pages in the book soon, but aside from the sad numbers, one thing that has stuck out for buyers is Mayer’s touting of Index, its Don Quixote voice search effort in mobile. Calling it a personal assistant — and ignoring the fact that Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft already have robust products like this already on the market — one slide notes that it “accomplishes tasks on your behalf.”
The reason it was interesting was not that Yahoo was “fast following” everybody else, but that every major technology company is actively working on the “personal assistant”. This is true for many other “moon shots” that are being pursued.
Artificial Intelligence.
Drones.
Virtual/Augmented Reality.
Self-driving cars.
It’s like Tim, Sundar, Jeff, Satya, and Mark got in a room and unanimously agreed that these technologies are definitely the future and so everybody is pouring billions of dollars into them, hoping that they turn into multi-billion dollar businesses. I’m trying to remember another time where all the giants were acting in unison pursuing the same future together at the same time and none readily come to mind.
What usually happens is that the big giant of the time is working on what they have always done and some smaller player takes a contrarian view, which takes the giant completely off guard and the giant falls under the weight of their own hubris. IBM didn’t pay much attention to software, but then Microsoft ate their lunch. Microsoft didn’t really pay much attention to web search, and then Google ate their lunch. Google didn’t pay much attention to social, then Facebook ate… well I think that brings us up to date. And Apple trounced everybody by betting on the multi-touch smart phone, which has completely changed the rest of industry.
But now, I don’t see a dark horse yet that will come by and side swipe the giants. Maybe those days are gone and everybody has learned from the mistakes of the past, so they are all placing big bets on “moon shots”. Maybe it’s just group think at a larger scale than anybody has seen before. Maybe it’s the maturation of the technology industry, but this seems different. When the airplane and car industries matured, it seemed like there was less innovation by the big players and more just maintaining their market share. But in this case, there seems to be more innovation and pushing the limits of where the future could go.
I think Elon is the only real outlier. The Tesla Model S is a crowning achievement and the insane demand for the Model 3 is mind-boggling. But he is investing in batteries for the home, solar electricity, rocket ships, and the hyperloop. The self-driving car is a feature on the Model S/Model 3 and he is active in artificial intelligence with projects like Open AI with Sam Altman, but for the most part he is working in other areas like transportation and energy.
The other major outlier is in healthcare and specifically I think it is in genetics. Again credit to Kara Swisher for doing a great podcast with Anne Wojcicki, who definitely impressed me with her vision of 23andme. It’s not just doing genetic testing, but it’s about giving people control of their healthcare versus having it being decided by insurance companies and hospitals, where genetics is the window through which they can gain a stronghold to make this happen. I’d place my bet on Anne and her company being *the* leader in this space over the next ten years.
As for the other giants, maybe they are all going to walk off a cliff together or maybe they will climb the mountain to Valhalla, but my guess is that they are all working on the right things to secure their place in the future and they all have the resources to see it through the long haul. So I do think we are entering an era in technology like never before and we may not see another giant appear for some time to come.
