I continue to earn about fifteen cents a month as an Amazon Affiliate. Whoever bought that book from my top ten last week, thank you. This week, I wanted to talk a little about “The Next Big Thing.”
The Next Big Thing is a consumer phenomenon. Once upon a time, the iPhone was a “Next Big Thing”. At one point, the internet was a “Next Big Thing”. CD Rom drives, The Nintendo Switch, and even the Commodore 64 all had their moment in the sun as The Next Big Thing.
Figuring out what will be “The Next Big Thing” is hard. I gave a talk in Seattle called “Out of Touch: The Next Big Thing After The Next Big Thing.” My thesis was that in 2014, gesture technologies were up and coming, and there were so many interesting technical problems that needed to be solved that it would not be the Next Big Thing, but it could possibly be the Next Big Thing after that. It was a fun talk, and the audience rated it highly. I do not have my slides anymore or I would share them. All I have is this great picture of me wishing I was Tom Cruise.
Now that we are in 2024, I was clearly wrong about gesture technology’s speed to market. I remember declaring that there will be a point when gesture technology will be the predominant driver for man-machine interfaces. There will be a new form of sign language that machines will use to interpret gestures, and old people like me will use an old keyboard to talk to machines. The keyboard will not be connected to anything… Some product manager somewhere will take pity on us old people and have a “fax machine compatibility layer” that will watch the gestures of someone typing on the disconnected keyboard and understand what letters are supposed to appear.
There are lots of people who think that voice is a killer app for communicating with computers. They do not have kids, and some… probably do not have a robust dating life. I do not mean to be mean about it. They just forget that sound is a lousy shared transportation medium for data. It will be hard for a room full of kids to scream commands into some online game and have them all easily understood. At the same time, you can always add more cameras if you have maxed out the ability of a machine to count wriggling fingers and elbows. An interactive application with gestures is possible at a football stadium in the same way that a voice-driven application in the same venue is not.
So now that we know that I was mostly wrong about gesture technology a decade ago, what do I think about The Next Big Thing today?
I see three things.
GAAP (Games As A Platform)
I think that this is The Next Big Thing. Roblox and Fortnite have gotten to a billion dollars in creator payouts. This is almost real money! I am also learning that other platforms exist, like Zepeto. Also, while they are currently at a disadvantage in their current market position, Minecraft can still make itself felt here. If I had to bet dollars on this, I would bet on GAAP being a significant driver for consumer game spending. I think this will double by next year in size and be the big theme for next year’s GDC (Game Developer Conference).
Augmented Reality
Right on its heels, I can see the Apple Vision Pro and similar AR devices being very real by 2026. I have some self-interest in this position. I wagered a fancy steak dinner in SF that there will be 4 million AR devices in the marketplace by 2026. I do not know what the killer app for AR will look like yet, either. No one is throwing dead presidents at me to parachute in and get feral with the device in search of its Genre Defining Hit. I do think there is a clear prosumer and urban city dweller killer app outside of games. People looking to meet in real life will use AR tools to find replacement meeting places for work or play when someone is stuck in traffic or if the place they want to meet is just too busy. There is a clear advertising model here for coffee shops, bars, restaurants, and other businesses to offer incentives via discounts or BOGO (buy-one-get-one) for consumers to adjust their plans in real-time. AR can advertise the arbitrage opportunity inside the display, and the platform can also give everyone updates on where to go and when.
Distributed Ledgers
While this is the one I am most interested in, I think this one is the furthest out. I did not call it web3 or Crypto on purpose. Grifters and bad actors have done a considerable amount of damage to the growth of this space. We are in a prolonged period of indigestion on distributed ledgers accordingly. There are many uses for tokens and distributed ledgers, and we cannot get to this future fast enough for me. Some great use cases for distributed ledgers include resource access, public spending, fund-raising, member-based governance, and voting.
There you have it.
– 2025 will be the year of GAAP.
– 2026 will be the year of AR.
– 2029 will be the year of distributed ledgers aka web3
I will do my very best to remember to check in at the end of each of these years to see how far off I am. I do have a history of being very early to most new technologies.
See you all next week!
