Innovation Rises, Phoenix-like, from the Tech Wreckage
There were no iPhones loose in the world before June 2007. None. And no Androids either until a year later. Until Apple dropped the first version of its now ubiquitous phone, the best user experience you could hope for was Blackberry’s graphical user interface, gnarly keyboard, and form factor that while sleek, curvy and blue, would barely fit into a t-shirt pocket.
Yet 29 June 2007 marked the start of an extraordinary change in the world as the iPhone, and later, Samsung’s Android based phones ushered in the age of smart mobility. Uber, Instagram, Slack, Zoom, WhatsApp and ultimately TikTok all owe their extraordinary success to this disruptive movement.
Nokia, Motorola, Sony and Ericsson likely remember it slightly differently. Likewise, Microsoft which completely missed the moment, with its then CEO Steve Ballmer famously remarking, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”
Ballmer’s utter failure to recognise the shift in the world almost brought Microsoft unglued as it began what appeared to be the slow descent into obsolescence that so often characterises giant tech companies (think Compaq and Digital).
But Ballmer wasn’t alone. No less a figure than Bill Gates predicted Apple’s demise in 2006, claiming the iPhones would kill Apple’s lucrative iPod business, thus proving himself to be very right and very wrong at the same time.
In fact, it was Microsoft which was more damaged, as the rise of iOS and later Android ended its operating system monopoly with consumers, relegating it to the desktop.
Ballmer’s departure and the decision of his successor Satya Nadella to go all-in first on cloud and now on generative AI subsequently catapulted Microsoft back towards the top of the tech rankings.
The context is important. The emergence of the era of smart mobility was coincident to wreckage wrought by the global financial crisis, which likewise kicked off in mid-2007. According to The Guardian for instance, the GFC started on 9 August 2007, six weeks after the iPhone’s debut, when Bank Paribas pulled the pin on three hedge funds specialising in US mortgage debt. “This was the moment it became clear that there were tens of trillions of dollars’ worth of dodgy derivatives swilling round which were worth a lot less than the bankers had previously imagined.”
Yet the Great Recession that followed actually saw the rise of some extraordinary businesses and the creation of vast amounts of new wealth around the world.
It was a pattern we’ve seen before. The dotcom bubble burst in March 2000, after the NASDAQ peaked at 5048. (15 long years would pass before it recouped all of its losses.)
Yet out of the wreckage of that crash Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn emerged, as social networking reinvented the way we communicate.
That, in turn, ushered in an era of customer experience obsessions that gave rise to businesses like Exact Target (bought by Salesforce), Marketo and Magento (bought by Adobe), and eCommerce giants like Shopify.
Businesses that launched shortly before the crash also had to navigate the very same conditions that tech entrepreneurs find themselves into today. Businesses such as Salesforce and VMware (being acquired by Broadcom) and Netsuite (now owned by Oracle), which helped usher in the era of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), all survived that baptism of financial fire.
History Rhymes
The extraordinary focus on generative AI since the launch of ChatGPT in late November last year is a reminder of the remarkable capacity of the technology sector for reinvention. Its closest analogue – pardon the pun – was the launch of Netscape in December 1994, which ushered in the era of the World Wide Web.
Yet Generative AI – of which ChatGPT is the early poster child – is just one element of the AI revolution, and AI itself is just one of half a dozen distinctive technologies and trends likely to drive he next wave of technology entrepreneurialism.
AI generally is seen as having a potentially even more profound impact than mobile or the cloud, and surpassing the metaverse which almost seems a memory at this stage. Goldman Sachs for instance says that AI adoption could drive $7 trillion in global economic growth over 10 years.
The last two decades have seen an explosion in innovation based around, for instance, cloud computing, SaaS and social media. That led to a reorganisation of the way companies deliver customer experiences, and how consumers shop, communicate, travel and even date.
But according to the doyen of marketing technology, Scott Brinker (Editor-in-Chief of Chief Martec), the famous innovation S curve for each of these trends has reached maturity. Instead, Brinker sees four new S curves emerging, around artificial intelligence, software composability, augmented and virtual reality, and Web3 (though he is a little more circumspect on the last one.)
Most recently he noted that two of those four, software composability and AI are combining into a kind of meta driver.
According to Brinker, “It should be obvious that composability dramatically multiplies the number of apps in the world. It unleashes waves of combinational innovation, where different components can be mixed and matched in effectively an infinite number of niche contexts. That’s incredibly powerful in the hands of professional software developers. But what if anyone could compose their own apps?”
Nor is Brinker alone in seeking to identify the next wave of innovation drivers. While he is taking a longer, almost generational view, the latest Accenture Technology Vision (2023) report – now in its 20th annual iteration, also examines some of the more immediate and medium-term innovation amplifiers.
Accenture identifies four areas of focus; digital identity, data transparency, generative AI, and the re-emergence of science on enterprise investment agendas as drivers for corporate investment. In other words, these are the areas where those big enterprise budgets will be loudly sending out pricing signals to innovators.
On each, it notes;
Digital Identity: Accenture sees solving the digital identity problem as a quiet catalyst of this next generation of innovation, since many of the biggest technological ambitions are being held back by old models of identity.
Data transparency: The firm says transparency will be a precious resource for enterprises looking to lead these changes. Supply and demand for data among all enterprise stakeholders is dramatically increasing and enterprise will need to rethink their data collection and architecture designs.
Generative AI: Generative AI will become table stakes for any business, but that assumes we will have solved the issue of dealing with the sheer volume of data and insights needed to drive solutions for the next generation of business problems.
Science returns: And finally, Accenture argues that the feedback loop between science and technology is accelerating, with each driving the advancement of the other.
The response of investment markets to the latest tech downturn will be familiar to anyone who has lived through such downturns before. But, so too are the burgeoning opportunities emerging from or perhaps in spite of, the wreckage.
As Brinker noted earlier this year, 2023 will be a chaotic year, but will also usher in the start of a massive wave of growth.