Is Innovation Moving Away From The Latest Gadgets And Gizmos?

With artificial intelligence and machine learning  making a sure comeback what does the future hold  for hi-tech gadgets and devices?

It was an epic moment when Apple’s market cap was overtaken by Alphabet (Google’s parent) company on 2 February, 2016. The two companies have been on different trajectories, with analysts projecting a somewhat less bright future for Apple’s flagship iPhone (despite the company posting phenomenal profits, in fact, the largest profits any company has ever made, beating its record). Alphabet is more of a mystery, partly because they have a bunch of ‘moonshot’ projects, and have been fairly secretive anyway.

But what it shows is that the paradigm of the last few years (dating back to the arrival of the extraordinarily successful iPhone) may well be reaching saturation: a situation in which Apple tightly controlled the entire stack for its products.

A friend recently did a PhD thesis on how there is tension between an ‘integrated’ view and a ‘disintegrated’ view of products, as well as on the dichotomy between inventing in new things (exploration) and appropriating the value from that place (exploitation).

Apple has been successful with their extraordinarily beautifully-designed products, which incidentally is one of the reasons the entire ‘Design Thinking’ philosophy is making steady progress in India now. (However, lest I confuse people, Design Thinking is not about the industrial design per se, but the discipline of user-centric design, after really considering it from the point of view of what problems they are bothered by, and how the products satisfy that need).

Part of the reason they can bring out works of industrial art is that, despite their disdain for market research, the philosophy at Apple has always been about offering a seamlessly integrated experience to users.

I was one of the early users of the Macintosh : I was at Bell Labs, and a Mac materialized in a nearby lab, and I just started using it without any instruction manual whatsoever. And it was a revelation how friendly it was. Those who have used emacs or vi as editors know what I’m talking about when I say how startling a WISYWIG editor was in those days.

Although it failed in the early days of the Macintosh in capturing market share – the Microsoft model of a loose federation (the disintegrated model) of cooperating entities bound by interfaces worked better – Apple, of course, had the last laugh over the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and in particular about its business-model star, iTunes. But there are problems: the iPad is plateauing after a strong takeoff, the iPhone is slowing, and the latest and greatest, the iWatch, has not exactly set the world on fire.

Thus, the rise of the other members of the GAFA gang (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) puts into sharp relief a phenomenon that many commented on at the end of 2015: the age of the device was not yet upon us. The predicted revolution in the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable devices isn’t here yet, although surely, despite the hype, they will arrive sometime soon. Probably not in 2016, though.

The problem is that the wearable devices invented so far are all ‘nice to haves’, not ‘must haves’. The watch form factor is too small and picky to be used as anything more than a curiosity. People who have bought fitness devices (anecdotal evidence suggests so) end up junking them after a few months because they are not providing anything particularly useful, and are merely entertaining.

I predict that this situation will change when useful wearable medical devices come to market. For instance, many people would be interested in a device that tracks their blood sugar levels on an ongoing basis, in a non-invasive way, perhaps by measuring something in sweat and correlating it with sugar levels. There is already a product invented by Google in partnership with a pharma major: a contact lens that measures sugar content in tears and transmits the data wirelessly to your smartphone.

A product like this, or my idea, a wearable device like a bracelet that measures sweat or other body parameters without pricking the skin, would sell like hot cakes in India if it is inexpensive enough. India is, after all, the diabetes capital of the world, although inner cities in the US also see a diabetes epidemic mostly caused by a bizarre chain of events linked to the ubiquity of cheap high-fructose corn syrup at highly subsidized prices.

But gadgets like these a little far off in the future: I don’t expect any to be shipping in volume before 2017. There is one candidate for gizmo heaven in 2016, and that is the virtual reality headset. Oculus Rift has made some waves, and even Cardboard from Google, which is inexpensive, is supposed to be quite good. Venture capitalists have plowed some $4 billion into the technology in the last five years. A company named Magic Leap has just raised a large amount of money that values it at $4.5 billion.

I have my doubts about the value of virtual reality (I can see the benefit of augmented reality a little more readily). They tell me that the future of computing and the human machine interface will all be based on immersive, virtual reality. I don’t know; I am finding that hard to imagine: do you want to spend all your computing time with a big helmet around your face, closed off from physical reality and immersed in a virtual world? Maybe it’s good for games (and I can see the value for pornography!) but for everyday life, I am a sceptic.

Of course, there are a couple of technologies showing promise: drones, or self-driving cars. While the days when drones are going to be delivering packages to your doorstep may be far off, and the air traffic and regulatory issues need a lot of work, they have become genuinely viable at this time. Similarly, fully autonomous cars and trucks may be some way off in the future, but there is steady progress being towards them. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are making a sure comeback.

The overall trend is not great for devices. Recent news that GoPro, the maker of action-oriented video cameras, and an erstwhile market darling, had much lower than expected sales (which hammered its stock price) suggests that, just like the earlier Flip camera, this gadget is also reaching saturation. Thus, the chances are that this year will not be the year of devices any more than 2015 was.