How do we get beyond 'that's a toy!' and 'but everything looked like a toy!', and try actually to understand whether a new technology might matter? What are valid lines of reasoning, and what statements are 'not even wrong'?
Read MoreLooking forward 10 years, there are three primary technology that will change everything - cars, augmented reality and machine learning. But in the meantime, there ere huge changes around advertising, TV and retail that come from consumer behavior and industry dynamics, not tech, but will change just as much.
Read MoreWith fundamental technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things.
Read MoreYou need to ask not whether this idea will fail, let alone whether it could fail, but rather, ‘what would it be if it worked?’ You need, in a sense, to ‘suspend disbelief’ - to put aside your normal human risk-aversion and skepticism, accept the probability that it could go to zero, and ask if this could 'put a dent in the world', and if so, how big.
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 does the history of mobile tell us abut the future of cars and VR?
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
Read MoreSometimes, an entire industry gets reset to zero, and all the entrenched advantages and parameters go away. The iPhone had that effect, and so did HMS Dreadnought.
Read MoreUnfair but relevant comparisons are the most interesting and important kinds. An unfair comparison generally means an unfair advantage, and this isn't the Olympics - unfair is good. Customers don't care if a company's advantage is unfair. Investors don't care. Unfair advantages are often the best kind.
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