John Sculley On The Next Big Thing
from the from-soda-water-to-where? dept
Back during the early boom years of the internet, there was a joke saying that we were all so focused on the underlying technology of the internet, that if it were a movie theater, we'd all be staring at the projector and not the screen. It looks like we're finally starting to turn our heads in the right direction. News.com is running an interesting interview with John Sculley where he makes some good points about "the next big thing". He agrees with many others that this is more than just a cyclical change - and that, just as hardware became a commodity, services and software are quickly becoming commodities. However, while some see this as a reason to be negative, he sees it as an opportunity. No longer are people just going to be focused on the next "whiz bang" technology. Instead, the focus is going to be on what innovative things you can do with that technology. This is a subtle, but extremely important, distinction that gets lost in many such discussions. Innovation is no longer about the technology itself - but what creative uses that technology is put to. As for more specific areas of technology to watch, he suggests wireless is going to be huge - and is specifically interested in WiFi because it removes the cost of spectrum from the equation, and opens up plenty of possibilities that are limited for those who need to buy spectrum. When it's pointed out to him that the current generation of WiFi-related startups are all struggling to make money, he suggests that's a very short term view. To him, today's WiFi is like CB-radio - something that became very popular, but never became a real business. However, what it did was get people interested in the idea of easy, mobile, person-to-person communication. Thus, he believes, CB-radio really got people interested in the mobile phone. Now, he believes that today's WiFi is doing the same thing for high speed mobile data - and the next generation of WiFi-related applications are where things really begin to take off.
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The point is that it made people understand the idea of mobile communications.
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From a marketing aspect, ABSOLUTELY CB's got america interested in mobile phones. It made the concept of mobile communication something not relegated to military and police function only, and brought it to the people. Perhaps Europe was exempt from the CB craze, but perhaps they were also exempt from the personal computer craze everyone felt in the states in the 80's.
And yes, I own a CB. No, I am not a trucker.
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