The Gapingvoid Email - free insights & inspiration three times a week!
Why doesn’t anyone know anything?
The technology business is very much like the movie business: For all the very smart people working in it, the reality is, to quote William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.”
The big game-changer in the 1880s was electricity, which allowed factories to operate inside cities, which allowed the large, metropolitan economies to happen.
But the clever people who made electricity happen never saw the next big thing, which was the automobile, Henry Ford and all that.
And the auto people never saw the next big thing after that, which was the microchip.
And what’s the next big thing after the microchip? Sure, there are folks who’d like to convince you it’s something they’ve already invested heavily in, say, cryptocurrency or AI or quantum computing, but the reality is, same as before, “Nobody knows anything”.
Yes, Bill Gates bet on the future and won (with the microchip and the personal computer). But that wasn’t because he was clairvoyant, it was because the thing he happened to be most passionate about turned out to be the future. The Roman goddess, Fortuna had smiled on him, that’s all.
