With fundamental technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things.
Read More“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing”. A few big ideas - internet, mobile, smartphones, social - have given us billion-user scale - now we see many new things built on top of those.
Read More"'The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history and to try and catch on to his coattails as he marches past'. How inevitable is technology, and how much is luck and great leadership?
Read MoreA technology often produces its best results just when it's ready to be replaced - it's the best it's ever been, but it's also the best it could ever be. There's no room for more optimisation - the technology has run its course and it's time for something new, and any further attempts at optimisation produce something that doesn't make much sense.
Read MoreIf mobile reaches everyone on earth, how can it be disrupted? Perhaps instead, our attention moves elsewhere.
Read MoreWhat did mobile look like before the iPhone, what did we think was going to happen, and what does that tell us about predicting the future?
Read MoreHow do the quirks and drawbacks of the San Francisco area shape the companies created here? How do they skew ecommerce?
Read More1990: Newspapers will win on the information superhighway
2000: Mobile operators will own the customer
2015: Car companies, TV companies...
When you try to work out the market potential for something fundamentally new, you’re actually trying to resolve two, linked problems.
First, you have to look past what it is now, and see how much better and cheaper it might become
Second, you need to think about who would buy it now, and who else would buy it once it is better and cheaper, and how it might be used.
In tech, the cheap weak product generally gets better quicker than the good expensive product gets cheaper. But in mobile, the good expensive product has generally got cheaper faster than the cheap, weak product got good
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