Augmented Hype and Reality
The Hype
The iPhone X is the first zero-to-one device released since the original iPhone.
The original iPhone started it all, by combining a touch screen, battery, internet, phone, GPS, camera and video camera, CPU, GPU, microphone, speakers, and accelerometer into one elegant package that worked, creating the conditions for a multitude of never before possible uses cases and businesses — a few obvious ones off the top of my head.
Instagram, Uber, Spotify, Snap, Venmo, Musical.ly, Headspace, Waze, Words with Friends….
and amazing operating leverage for thousands more including of course Google and Facebook, but also banks, airlines, media companies, communications companies.
Throughout it all the bundle of capabilities in the smartphone didn’t really change. Batteries got bigger, cameras fancier, cell service MUCH better. But nothing fundamental was added to the package - until iPhone X.
While staying somewhat under the radar because its somewhat poorly understood by analysts trained to react to speeds and feeds, the new iPhone packed in several new capabilities that will someday create companies as big and powerful as those created by the smartphone itself: Inside-out positional tracking, depth mapping, a honking new GPU, and onboard machine learning. Thc iPhone is indeed that rare creature: the zero-to one-device. These new superpowers, in a form factor that can fit into your pocket, will change the way we entertain, educate, communicate, shop, as well as launch powerful new use cases that we are only now just starting to imagine.
The Reality
Sometimes when a zero-to-one technology comes along, it’s immediately obvious what the main use case and benefits are going to be as it is more or less disrupting an inferior technology. Electric lights, the telegraph, the automobile, and the mp3 player are good examples. It’s different when a zero-to-one technology comes along that doesn’t have an earlier analog or requires new enabling infrastructure. The motion picture, the mobile phone, and the personal computer are examples of these. Often these technologies are initially dismissed as being novelties as their immediate use cases are limited. It takes a while for the crackpot entrepreneurs to gain traction by asking the only question that has ever mattered in this game: “What if”
In the case of mobile augmented reality, we are going to race through the predictable hype cycle of doom, driven by snarky tweeters and know-it-all luddites who can only recognize a sea change if it is accompanied by an immediate tsunami. It will likely take a year or two before the real magic of this new device starts to make itself known, mainly because the content needed to drive this revolution is still yet to be created and new businesses that were not previously technically possible (or easy enough) and so seem impossible from this side have not yet been uncovered by the visionaries.
Tim Cook has his Apple II though. Let’s go write Visicalc.
(Remember — it wasn’t until the after first spreadsheet software was written that anyone bought the Apple II)
