Interesting to see the range of responses to the Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of his aspiration to build a virtual world. This is the best of the interviews I read. As far as I can tell the only achievement that Facebook has is it’s algorithm that stole social interaction from the distributed net and concentrated it in a walled garden. Contrast that with Apple or Microsoft’s or Google’s embodiment of a vision in shipped products evolved to meet the challenges of advancing technology. It seems to me that the Facebook founder knows his time on stage will draw to a close as his users age and his only move will be to acquire the next platform (Instagram, What’s App).
You have to be in awe of what Apple has become from Apple II to Mac to iPhone to iPad to Watch. Never inventing the future mind you, just iterating to create a better, more expensive, more profitable experience. And kudo’s to Microsoft to emerging from the PC era to the cloud, continuing to dominate business software. My company’s IT infrastructure is almost entirely built on Microsoft products from email to Teams to Sharepoint.
Tech visions don’t always fail, but they do turn out to take unexpected turns and end up in places you wouldn’t expect. I loved my Palm Pilot, never got along with the Blackberry I had for a couple of years, enjoyed the Newton, but preferred the Palm Pilot. But we ended up with iPhones in the end. And that’s been the end of the chain for a long time now. A glass slab.
You can talk all you want about the vision. The lesson of Deciding Better is that you have only the Now in which to act. You can’t bring about the future, you can only do things in the present. Of course, those actions make some futures more likely and others less likely or maybe even impossible. But you can’t will the future into reality. I’ve found that it’s a common illusion among CEOs actually. They get disconnected from the real work of creating in the now and start to believe that their vision is what has brought the current reality into being.
Wow me with the first step toward this future and I’ll believe. So far all I can tell the VR rigs are good for is playing Fruit Ninja in 3-D or taking calming immersive journeys. Sometimes I wonder whether Tim Cook’s frequent enthusiasms about augmented reality isn’t trolling competitors like Zuckerberg. But no, Apple has not only shipped “Spatial Audio”, they are using it and integrating it into daily use for music and conferencing. I’ve seen QR-coded exhibits where you can get an AR overlay for the phone. My car has a heads up display that alerts me to speed limit changes. These are real steps toward a future where there is more than our mind’s semantic tags on what we see, but an extension of what we can know spatially integrated into the world as we move through it.
As some one once said, “Real artists ship”