Over the last few years, someone was promising the next big thing after phones. They would say that the iPhone is the most ubiquitous product in the history of consumer electronics and that the phone reprogrammed the world. Have you seen the voice assistant that tells you where to go, or the humongous goggles that let you play ping-pong with someone around the world? The future is here.
We are in a moment of retrenchment in the tech industry, as companies of all types grapple with a tough economy and the fact that the Pandemic wasn't so much an indicator of future trends as it was, well, a global epidemic that forced everyone to change their lives Most people are back in work, kids are back in school, and we are mostly back to 2019.
The future promised by the upstarts has taken a beating in the last few months. The team responsible for making the metaverse happen was laid off. The Quest Pro was supposed to be an exciting glimpse at the future of augmented and virtual reality.
The past few months have taken a toll.
Thousands of jobs have been cut by Amazon, with the most affected being the team that works with the voice activated device. The Spectacles team was laid off along with 20 percent of the staff. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, has said that the company needs to be very deliberate in its hiring in the future. Microsoft has decided to be a software supplier instead of a manufacturer of the augmented reality headset.
With stock prices down across the tech industry and an uncertain future for the economy, there isn't much budget or freedom to build things that aren't working. A lot of big ideas without a business plan or enough users are left after a decade of growth.
It is possible that Amazon's failure is the most important thing here. The company spent the better part of a decade trying to get into the phone market with the Fire Phone. Dave Limp, the senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon, told the Financial Times that he would take five Fire Phone failures if he could get one voice activated device.
Executives at the company will regale you with stories about all the things the voice assistant can do for you, and tell you of the millions of people chatting away with their own devices. The company has struggled to find a business model for the device and to get users to do more than play music and set timers.
The big idea of Amazon was correct. A seamless network of gadgets that know you and can act on your behalf is what most of the tech industry believes in. There are a lot of Amazon devices in people's homes. Nobody has figured out how to make Ambient Computing profitable.
Do you have speakers make noise in people's living rooms? That is not a good user experience. Do you allow businesses to charge for the right to sell toilet paper to people who ask for it? Users don't trust the system To make it easy for you to have successful interactions with their assistants, the teams behind them have been struggling to figure out what you can do with them. You know how to use the big screen in your pocket.
The companies working on augmented reality, virtual reality, and the metaverse are trying to convince the world that they want to spend all their waking and working hours inside of a headset. It is likely that augmented reality will be used to get directions and access information about the real world in the future. It isn't clear that virtual reality is going to be a mainstream activity outside of video games.
It isn't like there's any category in tech that is a smashing success in these uncertain times I guess Mac sales aren't included. The lesson here is to ruin your products and then improve them. The market for smartphones is down this year, according to the analysis firm.
Things didn't look up after that In part for supply reasons but also because it wasn't a terribly exciting upgrade over the iPhone 13, the launch of the iPhone 14 wasn't as well-received as Apple expected. The phone was nice but not sexy. If you wanted to buy anything from either of those two companies, you would buy the GALAXY S22 from SAMSUNG. Even though flipping and folding phones might be a thing, they are not really innovative anymore because phones are a large, mature market.
It seems like phones are unstoppable. The things that are already doing well are phones. Live View in Maps is a good augmented-reality navigation tool that works well on both the iPad and the phone. You will get better and more fun photos out of Spectacles than you will out of snapchat. The promise of the metaverse is that you are not stuck with no legs and no easy way out of the virtual environment. Everyone is trying to build new and better platforms, but it is possible that there isn't one as powerful and versatile as a touch screen in your pocket.
That is only because they have been so good for so long.
It is only because they have been good for so long that smartphones are boring now. They have become even harder to disrupt as they have become ingrained in our lives. The device that can do everything is always with you. I think the battery life is good. Good fortune with that on your glasses.
There is a lot to be said about the potential for other devices to do things better and help reset our relationship with technology. It is hoped that whatever does eventually replace the phone as our primary computing method will involve fewer push notifications and less tactics designed to snatch our personal data and keep us engaged for too long. As the tech industry tries to figure out what the next decade will look like, it is clear that the next big thing is in your pocket.
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