Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others.
Read MoreCar people often look at Tesla the way Nokia looked at the iPhone. “Nice ideas, but we can easily do all of that, and they don’t understand our industry.” Nokia was wrong - but will the car industry look the same? Maybe not.
Read MoreWe talk a lot about levels of autonomy, and ask when the first ‘fully autonomous’ cars will appear. That might be the wrong way to look at it - there will be lots of different kinds of ‘autonomy’, and the ‘where’ and ‘what’ may matter as much as the ‘when’.
Read MoreWhat winner-take-all effects could there be in autonomous cars? Are there network effects that would allow the top one or two companies to squeeze the rest out, as happened in smartphone or PC operating systems? Or might there be room for five or ten companies to compete indefinitely? And for what layers in the stack does victory give power in other layers?
Read MoreElectric and autonomy are rolling through the car industry, changing everything about it. But though they transform gasoline and car accidents, they could change a lot more besides - everything from cigarettes to parking. It's the second-order consequences that are hardest to see, but most interesting.
Read MoreCars today are much like phones in 2007 - overloaded by features and badly in need of a new interface model, even as we move slowly towards autonomous cars, which will have no interfaces at all.
Read MoreCars are going to change a lot in the next few decades. Electricity on one hand and software on the other change what a car is, how it gets made and who might own one.
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