Rather a tremendous amount of effort is being poured into an effort to keep the Big Tech growth machine going, and yet the returns seem to keep diminishing. What is the last big tech innovation to really disrupt how we have lived? It seems like a tie between the iPhone and Facebook/Twitter--although I am old, and so perhaps the answer is TikTok or the streaming services that were familiar already by ca. 2010/2011. But everything since then has been in service of refinement, not disruption--AWS is a giant business but it is not really a disruptive one in terms of the daily lived experience (as opposed to the infrastructure of the world). I think that SV folks are chasing the dragon to try to find that next giant hit, rather than focusing on enabling and having sustainable profits, and in doing so they'll wreck a lot of their own options.
Rather a tremendous amount of effort is being poured into an effort to keep the Big Tech growth machine going, and yet the returns seem to keep diminishing. What is the last big tech innovation to really disrupt how we have lived? It seems like a tie between the iPhone and Facebook/Twitter--although I am old, and so perhaps the answer is TikTok or the streaming services that were familiar already by ca. 2010/2011. But everything since then has been in service of refinement, not disruption--AWS is a giant business but it is not really a disruptive one in terms of the daily lived experience (as opposed to the infrastructure of the world). I think that SV folks are chasing the dragon to try to find that next giant hit, rather than focusing on enabling and having sustainable profits, and in doing so they'll wreck a lot of their own options.