Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. I guess that sounds really smart. Sometimes, we are doomed to repeat things regardless of whether or not we learned from history. Obsolescence of content platforms is the ripe and juicy fruit of deliciousness for today’s random extrapolation of thinkery.
The inevitability of a platform becoming obsolete feels like a thing to me. I don’t know that we have some sort of clever Moore’s Law around it and it has happened for every single platform out there. Whether you are downloadable casual games, mobile 1.0 feature-phone games, or even flash-based games in the browser, you had a black-swan moment when eventually someone said “hey the party is over” with their wallet, and your revenue went to zero. In the casual-games downloadable space, the last blow was struck by the sudden flood of hidden object games that crowded out all the other content. Ironically, no one saw the hidden object game crisis coming.
This is a natural phenomenon. It happens without fail every five to nine years. Each platform has its moment in the sun and then gets its place on the boom-bust market curve. What keeps me fighting the good fight is the fact that every boom cycle always is more biggerer than the last bust cycle. If you accept this as a reasonable hypothesis, the forward thinking person asks “What about modern day mobile 2.0 app stores?”
I believe they too shall pass. We are seeing the struggle mounting even now by companies like Epic Games, who are suing Apple and Google to break the monopoly on their respective ecosystems. Certainly this platform is backed by some of the biggest companies of today. But that was also true the last time around. Carrier-based game decks had every carrier as a giant corporation behind them; and the casual downloadable games portals were backed by some of the biggest internet companies. So if we accept that in content, there is no such thing as “too big to fail”, then what does that mean for tomorrow?
If we could magically answer this question, we would have some super serious cheddar in the bank. I cannot magically answer this question. I also may be intermittently lactose intolerant, so who needs all that cheddar anway. Also please put your cheddar in the fridge. I digress. For the coming App-ocalypse I am not going to be able to choose the form of the destructor. I can only try to convince you it is coming based on the past history of all the digital content marketplaces ever. So again I ask: What does that mean for the world of tomorrow?
I gave a super random talk in Seattle many years ago called “Out of Touch, the Next Big Thing after The Next Big Thing”. It was a clever presentation on gesture technology. It may have something to do with my old-person dislike of touch screens. I still do not forgive you all for being accessories to the second-degree murder of the Palm Pre; I loved that phone. It has everything to do with what is next, or even what is next after whatever is next. I was greatly appreciated by a handful of UX researchers in the audience. I could tell that almost everyone else in the room was not interested in talking about stuff that far out; most of them were just trying to survive until the free beers at five pm. So let’s talk about What Comes Next. For realsies, this time.
There were a lot of people who jumped onto the VR hype train; I know I did. The dreams of being able to strap a bucket to your head and be transported to amazing destinations without being crowded into a Southwest Airlines middle seat were very seductive. It seemed like we were there with graphics processing technology. I jumped in. Unfortunately, dear reader, the problem is that I did not pay enough attention to the fine print. Let me restate that for dramatic effect. The problem was not that I did not pay attention to the fine print, the problem is that I simply couldn’t. Trying to read text in VR is like trying to play pool with a rope; it is a pretty fruitless exercise. While we have the graphical capability to show cool stuff to users with a bucket on their head, the problem was in the rendering capability of the screens that were strapped to your eyeballs. Reading text in anything other than garish preschool lettering and fonts was a near impossibility. The hype train had already left the station unfortunately. It would have been great if someone could have addressed that issue before it got as far as it did for consumers. The whole thing, for lack of a better phrase, failed to deliver on its vision.
I hate to be the person to scratch out VR for the consumer masses; unfortunately I am not able to reach any other conclusion. I do not think it is there. I do not think it will be there with the hardware that is currently in super secret labs around the world. I apologize for the deception here. I know I said I would talk about what is next, not what-is-next-after-what-is-next, nor what is not next. I am a confusing creature sometimes.
Now that I have beaten your expectations senseless with a shovel, let’s finally make The Prediction. Before I do; I have to declare, for total transparency, that I have a fancy cooked-meat dinner riding on The Prediction. You heard me correctly; there is something at steak here.
I think that the next major platform is going to be Augmented Reality. I believe we are not quite there yet, because there are still a few technical problems to solve. I also think that the black swan event that eventually craters the mobile ecosystem is a few years out. The Epic lawsuit against Google and Apple may play into that. The Hyper Casual publishing phenomenon is a likelier crater of impact, or the fact that the number of incumbent IP at the top of the channel continues to accrete years of existence. At a certain point of age, the enthusiasm for “rehashed previously enjoyed” content will turn into yawns and swipe-lefts. The indescribable hunt for cool will drive consumers and trendsetters elsewhere.
So we have unsolved consumer technology problems, and we have no real clear idea of what “this is totes not adorbs” will look like. Hardly a compelling case for the end-of-times for the app store; at least in the next five years. I do think that both of these boxes will be checked by 2025 at the earliest, and by 2027 at the latest.
It is not clear to me if the form factor for next generation Augmented Reality is going to be a transparent hand device, a set of glasses with a small processing unit wired into it, a funky visor, or even just some sort of snazzy data projector on your wrist. It could even wind up being the dashboard on your car, at this point. I do believe it is coming in five years and it is coming for your phone and your in-app purchases. You should be very afraid.
The other thing that is not clear to me is the form of the platform defining content. Every platform has it. When you say “cd rom” people think “Myst”. When you say “sound blaster” people think “Wing Commander”. When you say “Nintendo” you probably even add an accent when you reply “Its-a me! Mario!”. Generation 0.1 of mobile had Nokia Snake. The current generation of mobile games have Supercell’s smash hit Clash of Clans as its genre-defining hit; possibly even Candy Crush could be considered as a class equivalent even though it is not gamer-focused like many others. You might buy a phone just to play Clash of Clans; you probably did not buy a phone just to play Candy Crush. You sure as heck installed the crap out of that game. I will bend my own definitions of platform-defining content so you do not feel guilty for swiping those sweet, sweet candies.
The biggest thing that will drive the adoption of AR is going to parallel the thing that drove smart-phone adoption for content consumption: price and convenience. I am concerned that it will be nebulous and tepid for content, despite how cool Pokemon Go looks. Pokemon Go did not prove that AR is an accessible platform. Pokemon Go proved that Pokemen does not release enough expansions and content to appease its rabid fan base. If you doubt me, ask why you no longer see crowds of Pokemon hunters on the piers of Santa Monica anymore; at its peak it was up to 1 in 3 people by my own personal estimate. Now it is as hard to find as Reebok high tops, and Trapper Keeper binders. C’est ne pas une fad.
This frightens me as a content creator and lover of platform-defining hits. I do think that everyone is getting ready to toss their increasingly-more-expensive-phones with increasingly-watered-down-content-offerings. They stopped making them smaller; it also feels like they stopped making them better beyond annual incremental technology upgrades.
I think we are just about ready for a world where we get a shiny new device. My belief is that its killer app will be to superimpose the best BOGO or discount offer on a cup of coffee just by peering through it. Heck, people may just want the time arbitrage of knowing where the shortest line to that sweet sweet cuppa joe is hiding.
Sometime after we are all peering into our phones to save five minutes or five dollars as we do the hokey-pokey and turn ourselves around, a random content developer will inject a big enough dopamine hit by accident that everyone will want to get one. We will all tweet and snip-snap our newly discovered chemically-induced rush, and a new content platform will be born.
So there you have it. My money is on 2025 being the year this product comes to market, even if I do not have all of the details. If I am wrong, I owe a steak dinner to someone. If I am right I am going to do a little victory dance after the first mouthful and I shall ask my friend, or perhaps some random passerby, to film it for your viewing pleasure.
And now that you have read my brief glimpse into the future, I encourage you to follow me on the socials. Twitter, Linkedin, RSS Food, whatever you do. In five years time I hope to dance for you. I cannot say it will be a good dance, but I will enjoy it greatly; I firmly believe that I will win this bet.
