In terms of technical "next big thing" I think some of the better startups showed up in the smoke of the dot com crash and the 2008 crisis. There are so many areas where we are using Rube Goldberg contraptions, both in tooling and products, that I'm confident we will see progress. There's still a lot of low-hanging fruit out there. And maybe they were just needing some of the junk crops to be cleared to have space to grow.
If you ask Zuckerberg, it's VR.
Musk, it's batteries, then space transit, the Mars.
Bezos, it's media power.
Google/Alphabet, it's sort form of self-driving map-navigating vehicle.
Microsoft, it's whatever the next startup they acquire is working on.
For smartphones, it's wafer-thin clear devices that are basically: ID card, credit card, smartphone in one. 2025?
For old people, it's personal robotic assistance.
For travel, it's "multi country visas" (like Schengen in EU or CTA in IE / UK, but for more and more regions that are not in a combined area), but also: "multi product travel agents", like you just go to the app, pick your next city, and you'll see a couple of price tiers of package, with each automatically taking care of: your hotel booking, your flights, your airport to hotel transport, plus any data sims, and other basics you need. And then it works the same for every city you want to go. Just works.
Currently, when you start your favorite GUI based editor, and tell it to open a file, it calls on the OS to present a dialog box, who chooses file(s), those names are then passed back to the editor. The editor then uses the users permission to open the file(s), and allow you to edit your data. Note that there is NOTHING stopping the program from getting confused or malicious and opening any arbitrary file using that user's account.
The exact same workflow happens in a Capabilities based OS, except the names of the parts and constraints (that you don't see) are different. It works exactly the same, as far as the user is concerned.
Instead of calling on the OS to present a dialog, then directly accessing the files, the program calls the OS to present a PowerBox to the user, and it returns capabilities to files or folders, the program has NO access to any other folders or files. No matter how confused or rogue the editor can not corrupt anything outside of the objects specifically chosen by the user.
I remember when Gmail first came out, there was a major revolution in how webapps were written. All of a sudden it was all about AJAX! There have been several of those major ebbs and flows, where the whole industry decides that a particular way to do something is the preferred way, and so everybody does it. Entire cottage industries are then developed to train up some programmers on how to do that thing.
And usually, those transitions happened because some big company rewrites a bunch of their stuff. I'd say the most recent one of those is Facebook creating React and doing all their stuff in it. We're still riding that wave.
But, browsers have more or less completed their transition away from being some kind of "document" viewer and into being a fully-fledged execution environment and rendering system. WASM lets you run stuff fast. There are already libraries for languages like Go and Rust that purport to let you compile your app to desktop, mobile, and WASM. Truly one codebase.
I think a big company will come along and do it, and then everyone will do it. Personally, I can't wait for the transition. I never really liked web technologies, despite having worked with them for about 20 years now.
A hundred years from now people will still be using little rectangular screens in their pockets like we do today.
Their batteries may last a lot longer or maybe they will be as thin as paper but they will still be recognizable to us as smartphones.
The laptop and desktop PC form factors will also persist.
Backyard pizza ovens like (like Ooni) are going to explode in popularity really soon. Similar if not more than Traegers.
Homeschooling curriculum/resources. Huge uptick since Covid that might be here to stay.
Kit/manufactured homes. Huge demand for prefab home options that don't suck. We're seeing this with tiny homes and upscale ADUs - someone who brings the costs down will control the space.
Mala - this flavor profile exploded in popularity in Asia. It's currently really hard to find good recreations in the US consistently, but I would almost guarantee the first chain restaurant that offers a decent mala fried chicken sandwich would basically print money for themselves.
Today, models are trained on massive GPUs that live very far away from CPUs (microseconds). This means the models end up having extremely predictable workloads (dense linear algebra). If CPUs were closer to that much compute, you could efficiently execute substantially more dynamic work. Apple and Intel are both getting there with AMX coprocessors (that live only nanoseconds away).
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It'll be up to many factors if this nationalism is peaceful, pragmatic, and without many frills like Mexico's recent push for self-sufficiency in gasoline/agriculture[1][2], France's energy nationalization[3], etc. or radical, discriminatory and even violent, like Trumpism, Brexit, etc.
In terms of policy I expect we'll see more tariffs, fewer new free-trade agreements, some countries might roll back on theirs, and we'll see much more government intervention to help national industry compete. Beyond economic policy this will include immigration policy, but it doesn't necessarily mean forbidding immigration. Countries that do it pragmatically will keep using it as a tool to capture value and protect national interests (getting the right workers, strategically capturing investment from some foreigners but maybe not others, etc). Countries that don't will base policy on prejudice.
I don't expect free trade to end anytime soon, or for things to get as tense and divided as during the Cold War, but do expect "soft" blocs to be better defined. In terms of the tech industry, I wouldn't expect more "great firewalls" like China's, but perhaps more regulation over data collection and physical location, taxes, and even bans (like Huawei's in the USA, TikTok in India) or forced sales (like what almost happened to TikTok in the USA).
[1]: https://mexicobusiness.news/agribusiness/news/mexico-will-ac...
[2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/12/28/mexico-plans-to...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/france-announce-deta...
90 years ago they’d tell you ford is doing some cool stuff with the Model T but they wonder what’ll be next… there’s so many startups! The next thing is around the corner.
80 years ago they’d tell you ford is a massive player and is probably working on something new and exciting.
70 years ago they’d thank ford for a job, and tell you how exciting their mustang is.
60 years ago…
50 years ago they’d tell you how depressing Detroit got. Everyone left and the jobs left and it’s just ford still and they didn’t change much about cars!
40 years ago they’d tell you the same and cars are still basically the same but now everyone is buying a Japanese car because gas is so expensive! Ford will come back and show off a fuel efficient one shortly for sure!
30 years ago they’d tell you how depressing Detroit is. There’s so many Asian car brands now!
20 years ago they’d tell you about alternative fuel. Batteries (terrible!), hydrogen (promising!), biogas (maybe?). So many people working on alternative fuels for cars… that are just cars.
10 years ago everyone would tell you Tesla is the future. A car… but make it electric! The fuel efficient American car of the 80s came true.
Now? People tell you Tesla. Maybe every other car company will be electric.
TLDR. There might not be a next big thing for a while, but no one in tech will see it they way no one in Detroit saw the next big thing (it wasn’t cars). Tech is broader than cars, but we “figured out” computers, phones, etc.
Maybe VR and alternative interfaces aren’t established and have room to grow but maybe it’s just a toy. Maybe crypto will change how people do things… but maybe it’s a Ponzi scheme. Batteries may be big in the future, but that’s hardly a bold prediction based on how much we use batteries. Maybe AI generated content will supplement existing media but maybe that’s too uncanny for people and the tech won’t mature fast enough. People seem to be rejecting mass-social media (fb, twitter) in favor of more personal forms (DMs, BeReal) but maybe that’s just a reversion to normal after a temporary phase of society. Voice assistants exploded a few years ago, but now players are starting to back out (Cortana). Was that because every tech company FOMOed that trend that didn’t come?
Every business you see today wants more stability. Does Alexa exist because Amazon thinks the world needs a voice assistant and they can do better or because it gets people to buy more stuff? Every trend from a major company should be inspected for the line they share with their VPs when they fund it to know who wants this product.