Prognostication is a humbling
business. Last year at this time Mark Anderson, a tech futurist type and
CEO of the Strategic News Service, predicted that Amazon (AMZN) would have a tough time in 2015, citing e-book squabbles, drone expenditures and the Fire phone flop. Oops.
All Amazon did was blow the doors off in 2105, with the stock up over 120% in a flat market. What's up with that, Mark? “I thought Jeff [Bezos] was making too many mistakes, and that the shareholders and or customers would take it out on him,” he wrote to me in an email. “But AWS [Amazon Web Services] has been throwing off so much cash that nothing else mattered -- even though the NY Times story came out and harmed the company's reputation, and even though the Harvard Business Review dropped him from first place to near last based on some of these flaws. So, the world did indeed catch on to Jeff's issues, but cloud computing saved the day.”
All Amazon did was blow the doors off in 2105, with the stock up over 120% in a flat market. What's up with that, Mark? “I thought Jeff [Bezos] was making too many mistakes, and that the shareholders and or customers would take it out on him,” he wrote to me in an email. “But AWS [Amazon Web Services] has been throwing off so much cash that nothing else mattered -- even though the NY Times story came out and harmed the company's reputation, and even though the Harvard Business Review dropped him from first place to near last based on some of these flaws. So, the world did indeed catch on to Jeff's issues, but cloud computing saved the day.”
Fair enough Mark, and good for you for owning up to your miss. (And by the way, Mark had some good calls too.)
With that cautionary tell in
mind, I set out to make some calls of my own, putting out three big tech
trends for 2016. These aren’t the
"holy-crow-I-never-even-thought-about-that" variety. Rather, they’re
existing trends that I think will either hit the mainstream, become part
of the public conversation, or have mega implications for investors in
2016. So here goes:
—VR. (If you have to ask what that means, you are officially behind the eight ball.) VR stands for virtual reality, of course, and yes, it’s those goofy headsets that zoom you into another world, and yes, you’ve been hearing about them for a few years now. But the point is that 2016 is the year these puppies will actually roll out to the general public. Even more significantly, VR really looks to be a major, incipient, platform battleground in the world of Tech. To wit: Sony (SNE) and Microsoft (MSFT) are debuting VR products next year. So, too, is HTC, which may be a Hail Mary for that company. Google (GOOGL) has already introduced Google Cardboard, a low-end VR offering and has also invested in a stealth VR company with the ultimate VC-bait name: “Magic Leap.” But maybe Facebook (FB) will plant the biggest stake in the ground with a product from its Oculus Rift subsidiary, which Zuck & Co. bought for $2 billion in 2014. How big a deal is this? In a recent interview I did with Facebook’s head of sales, Carolyn Everson, she talked about how the company operates with mobile as its primary platform today but then went on to characterize Oculus thusly: “We think that can be the next operating system for the future.” Wow! No small thing there. (If you want to see how enamored Zuck himself is of Oculus, check out this Vanity Fair piece.) Still early days here. Oculus will only work on high-end PCs (which is weird), and the audience is all about gamers for now. But 2016 is merely year one. What the VR biz looks like in 2026, no one knows, but it will be big.
By: Andy Serwer.
Review: Emerging Market Formulations & Research Unit, Flagship Records.
For The #FacebookTeam