Waymo, MobileEye, Skype Teams And Betting On The Future

There were 5 interesting pieces of news I wanted to talk about this week -

• Uber and Waymo’s fight over self driving car technology
• Intel’s acquisition of Mobileye for $15.3B
• Lingerie brand Cosabella replaced its advertising agency with Albert — an artificial intelligence platform
• Mulesoft’s successful IPO
• Microsoft’s launch of Slack competitor, Skype Teams

However, what is interesting is that these aren’t disparate stories. Instead, these tie together as part of a bigger story that’s unfolding — how technology giants from across generations are betting on the future. So, let’s explore that by deconstructing 5 things from this very wordy sketch.

1. The level of entrenchment of technology in our lives is cumulative. When the first personal computers came along, only hobbyists cared about them. This changed with time. The web pushed personal computer adoption along further and the two combined to make computers mainstream. But, both the web and PC eras were dwarfed by the reach of the mobile era. And, the next wave of technology will just build on the preceding eras.

2. Every wave has had its winners — and they stick around. Microsoft and Intel (or “Wintel”) were the winners of the PC era. While both missed web and mobile in a big way, Microsoft’s revenues in 2016 were 85 Billion dollars. That’s enough mileage for Microsoft to both play catch up as well as invest heavily in future waves. And, over the past few years, they’ve done just that.

A takeaway here is that any news about the supposed demise of Apple is simply noise. Apple’s resounding success in the mobile wave means it will be around at least for the next few waves with multiple opportunities to miss a wave or two and still do just fine.

3. Every wave enables trends that take a while to become mainstream. We must distinguish between the foundational technologies that make up a wave and the trends they enable. For example, mobile is the foundational technology that enables social and the sharing economy (I meant to call out “sharing economy” under mobile — different from simply being able to “share” links all over the internet in the web age). Messaging, for example, is a key social app and is what drove Facebook’s acquisition of Whatsapp. But, while apps like Whatsapp, WeChat, Kik and Line drove adoption in the consumer space, there was still plenty of white space for a great chat app in the enterprise space (this is normal — enterprise technology is generally a few years behind consumer technology). Enter Slack. And, as a result, Skype Teams from Microsoft as of this week.

Similarly, since the web age, enterprise software-as-a-service was theoretically possible. But, it took a while for that to materialize. And, the last few years have seen many remarkable SaaS companies go public. Mulesoft is one of them that had a successful IPO this week. Mulesoft’s main product enables companies to make data available through the various systems they use. For example, a retailer might use Mule to connect data across all its branches together.

Each of these trends end up disrupting traditional industries. The ability to search for links and share them around the web disrupted the newspaper industry. Social video continues to disrupt the television industry while location services have played havoc with Taxi medallion systems all around the world.

4. AI seems to be the next wave. I think it is safe to say we are entering the wave with artificial intelligence as the foundational technology. This is still day 1. So, we’re going to see artificial intelligence show up in every aspect of our lives over the next 5 years or so. Cosabella’s (a lingerie company) use of an artificial intelligence platform to replace its advertising agency is a sign of the extent of disruption that lies ahead. For a start, AI will be a key part of all key parts of our mobile phone and our digital assistant — it will be cumulative, after all.

The interesting question, then, is what trends does AI enable? Voice recognition is an obvious place to start. There are tons of other broad applications of AI as it makes every thing we know smarter. AI will be key in detecting fraud and helping us make smarter decisions in areas like healthcare. But, one such trend that is sure to have devastating effects is the development of self driving cars and trucks. Here’s why.

Intel’s need to be a part of this change is existential. Hence, the acquisition of MobileEye. And, this is also why Google cares about Uber allegedly stealing proprietary technology.

5. We need to think of today’s technology giants like venture capital firms. Every technology giant today is placing aggressive bets on the future. It is easy, in hindsight, to make sense of how personal computers wave led to the web, and then, mobile. But, it wasn’t obvious. There were many smart people and teams who believed otherwise — and for good reason.

Yuval Noah Harari, in his book — “Sapiens” asks a beautiful question — Why study history? He notes that we study history not to predict the future but to understand that our present situation is neither inevitable nor natural. And, that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we might have thought possible.

This idea is just as applicable when we think of the future of technology. Predicting the future is a fool’s errand. A better approach is to view it as a spectrum of possibilities and invest aggressively in our capabilities across them. Today’s technology giants — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft — are doing that in spades. They’ve invested in various degrees in artificial intelligence (TensorFlow, Alexa, Cortana, Siri), augmented reality/virtual reality (Oculus, Google VR, HoloLens) and the internet of Things (Nest, Apple HomeKit) while likely keeping an eye on how the Blockchain is evolving. Such investment in future technology was not the norm — but they’ve learnt from each other’s and other former giant’s (AOL, Yahoo, Dell) mistakes in past waves and are more formidable incumbents as a result.

Of course, viewing the future as a spectrum of possibilities and investing aggressively in capabilities needn’t be limited to technology companies. That’s a great way to think about our careers as well.

This is edition 2 of a weekly technology newsletter called Notes by Ada. If you like this and would like free weekly notes via email, please just subscribe here.